From phpPatterns this morning, there's a new article having to do with one of the "practical facets of eXtreme programming" - unit testing.

For anyone that doesn't know, unit testing is pretty much what it sounds like - testing each chunk of code in your application to ensure that it works, down to the last detail. In this article he gives some steps to ensure quality in your code. The basic concept of unit testing is write more code which will test the main code we've written, by "throwing" sample data at it and examining what it gets back.

He goes on to talk about the two types of testing that you can do: "black box" and "white box" testing. Black is just testing it from the outside, passing info in, while white is the opposite - digging into the meat of the code, and checking the results internally.

As I read more and more about this eXtreme programming stuff, the more I like it. I think if more people out there tried to follow these guidelines, software developers wouldn't have to worry so much about bugs, and could concentrate more on features instead...