Those who augment their development practice to include unit-testing--as I hope you have if you are following this series--can help insure they continue to embrace the discipline of 'test first' by saving their understanding of the software-under-test (SUT) within the actual test. This practice guards against you or another developer modifying the SUT without informing the test. For example, if someone adds a new property or function your test can alert you. This practice provides a little insurance to keep you honest to your promise to test first.

This practice can also check the implicit functions found within the SUT. Generally, I only check for the functions/methods I explicitly define within the SUT and ignore the implicit assessors provided by ColdFusion 9. But, the samples below can check for both if desired.

A unit test isolates and executes a small part of your software and compares the result with your expectations. The small part of your software being tested is generally called the Software-Under-Test (SUT). Isolation of the software (SUT) is improved when you fake the dependencies. Faking the dependencies is called 'Mocking'. Mocking will be covered in the next post in this series.

A few weeks ago I gave a free day of training to members of the Central Florida Web Developers User Group on ColdFusion's ColdBox framework. The training was a success. Everyone recognized the benefits of the framework and embracing the design patterns shown. In fact, one member who manages a site that yields 150,000 visits monthly has started to convert their existing spaghetti site to the ColdBox framework. The features of the ColdBox framework that stood out to those who attended were debugging, caching, plugins, interceptors—and testing.