Foreword to the First Edition

When Roy Osherove told me that he was working on a book about unit testing, I was very happy to hear it. The testing meme has been rising in the industry for years, but there has been a relative dearth of material available about unit testing. When I look at my bookshelf, I see books that are about test-driven development specifically and books about testing in general, but until now there has been no comprehensive reference for unit testing—no book that introduces the topic and guides the reader from first steps to widely accepted best practices. The fact that this is true is stunning. Unit testing isn’t a new practice. How did we get to this point?

It’s almost a cliché to say that we work in a very young industry, but it’s true. Mathematicians laid the foundations of our work less than 100 years ago, but we’ve only had hardware fast enough to exploit their insights for the last 60 years. There was an initial gap between theory and practice in our industry, and we’re only now discovering how it has impacted our field.