Why not hit the database inside unit tests?

Question

I\'ve read in blogs that the database should not be hit when the unit tests run. I understand the theory, however say i have complex store procedures that are part of a busi

Answer 1

YMHO There is a bit of semantic issue and a bit of a technical issue here.

A unit test is supposed to test a small part of code, in isolation, to check it without other code. A failed Unit Test should imply that only a small part of code will have to be inspected corrected (tipically, the code implementing the functionality and the unit test itself).

Other scopes of testing exist to check functionality of the system as a whole (system test), or functional tests to validate complete features, or integration tests to check interactions, regression testing to check for the absence of already corrected test etc.

A testing strategy has to be devised for each project, but in general having different categories helps a lot. So unit tests should be restricted to testing the smallest possible units of code, and use other testing procedure to test functionality, integration etc.

The semantic part is whether is correct to use a unit test library to perform some functional test, I guess it is no biggy if you keep your suites separated the strict unit tests and the functional tests (even if they share the testing tool)