XUnit

XUnit

When developing software, testing the software is a mandatory step. One type of testing, unit testing, involves testing the fundamental units of the software by writing code that tries out the target unit, checking inputs and outputs, one detail at a time. By keeping such automated testing code, programmers can verify that they haven't broken something along the way. Software to manage these tests are often called code-driven testing frameworks.

Various frameworks have come to be known collectively as xUnit. These frameworks allow testing of different elements (units) of software, such as functions and classes. The main advantage of xUnit frameworks is that they provide an automated solution with no need to write the same tests many times, and no need to remember what should be the result of each test. Such frameworks are based on a design by Kent Beck, originally implemented for Smalltalk as SUnit. Erich Gamma and Kent Beck ported SUnit to Java, creating JUnit. From there, the framework was also ported to other languages, e.g., CppUnit (for C++), NUnit (for .NET). They are all referred to as xUnit and are usually free, open source software. They are now available for many programming languages and development platforms.