What is the effect of creating unit tests during development on time to develop as well as time spent in maintenance activities?

Posted by jgauffin on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by jgauffin
Published on 2011-03-21T19:05:39Z Indexed on 2012/10/20 23:19 UTC
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unit-testing

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Maintenance

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quality

I'm a consultant and I am going to introduce unit tests to all developers at my client site. My goal is to ensure that all new applications should have unit tests for all classes created.

The client has a problem with high maintenance costs from fixing bugs in their existing applications. Their applications have a life span from between 5-15 years in which they continuously add new features. I'm quite confident that they will benefit greatly from starting with unit tests.

I'm interested in the effect of unit tests on the time and cost of development:

How much time will writing unit tests as part of the development process add?
How much time will be saved in maintenance activities (testing and debugging) by having good unit tests?

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