A Survey on Unit Testing Practices and Problems

Unit testing is a common practice where developers write test cases together with regular code. Automation frameworks such as JUnit for Java have popularised this approach, allowing frequent and automatic execution of unit test suites. Despite the appraisals of unit testing in practice, software engineering researchers see potential for improvement and investigate advanced techniques such as automated unit test generation. To align such research with the needs of practitioners, we conducted a survey amongst 225 software developers, covering different programming languages and 29 countries, using a global online marketing research platform. The survey responses confirm that unit testing is an important factor in software development, and suggest that there is indeed potential and need for research on automation of unit testing. The results help us to identify areas of importance on which further research will be necessary (e.g., Maintenance of unit tests), and also provide insights into the suitability of online marketing research platforms for software engineering surveys.