Unit Testing in the real world
- by Malfist
I manage a rather large application (50k+ lines of code) by myself, and it manages some rather critical business actions. To describe the program simple, I would say it's a fancy UI with the ability to display and change data from the database, and it's managing around 1,000 rental units, and about 3k tenants and all the finances.
When I make changes, because it's so large of a code base, I sometimes break something somewhere else. I typically test it by going though the stuff I changed at the functional level (i.e. I run the program and work through the UI), but I can't test for every situation. That is why I want to get started with unit testing.
However, this isn't a true, three tier program with a database tier, a business tier, and a UI tier. A lot of the business logic is performed in the UI classes, and many things are done on events. To complicate things, everything is database driven, and I've not seen (so far) good suggestions on how to unit test database interactions.
How would be a good way to get started with unit testing for this application. Keep in mind. I've never done unit testing or TDD before. Should I rewrite it to remove the business logic from the UI classes (a lot of work)? Or is there a better way?
