xUnit Test Patterns: Goals of Test Automation
- About This Chapter
- Why Test?
- Goals of Test Automation
- What's Next?
About This Chapter
Chapter 2, Test Smells, introduced the various "test smells" that can act as symptoms of problems with automated testing. This chapter describes the goals we should be striving to reach to ensure successful automated unit tests and customer tests. It begins with a general discussion of why we automate tests, then turns to a description of the overall goals of test automation, including reducing costs, improving quality, and improving the understanding of code. Each of these areas has more detailed named goals that are discussed briefly here as well. This chapter doesn't describe how to achieve these goals; that explanation will come in subsequent chapters where these goals are used as the rationale for many of the principles and patterns.