Unit Testing vs. Integration Testing of Software

What is Software Testing?

The term “software testing” sounds so simple, but the process of identifying and addressing software flaws is one of the hardest activities humans are asked to perform.

For software development and release, that means understanding everything from the software design process, source code, and development and deployment cycles to the testing process.

Whether you’re testing a website, database, mobile app, enterprise software or any other type of software, it’s important to be able to identify flaws in the software under test. The ability to identify flaws in software and then remove them is what makes testing so important.

Even with the most advanced development tools and processes, the software may be prone to flaws that lead to bugs or software errors, some of which may be minor or major and, because they have the potential to compromise a computer system’s performance, could cause major problems.

There are so many software testing procedures. The most common software testing procedures are black-box testing, white-box testing and grey-box testing. Here is an article to know what exactly a unit testing approach is.

Unit Testing

Unit testing is a method of testing in which you try to determine whether your software functions correctly by breaking it down into small parts.

Unit testing is the concept that you should test a single software component (Unit) to make sure that what you wrote as a functionality of the software can be developed as a part of the software (without compromising any other functionality). It is also called a Unit test.

You are given a software problem that you’d like to solve, but instead of having the whole system to work with, you test it out by breaking it down into smaller, easier-to-test chunks.

Unit testing helps to test various aspects of the system like:

• Whether the test code works at all, or it should be thrown an error.
• The system should work only for one single user at a time and not for multiple users simultaneously.
• The system should work for all possible inputs which can be given to it.
• All the functionalities must work simultaneously.
• The system should be stable all the time.
• The execution time must be reasonable.
• It should be able to check whether any change has been done to the code and what the output will be after the change.

Integration Testing

Integration testing (IT) is the act of testing individual components and sub-components as they are integrated into the application. It’s usually performed within the context of an existing integration test set, which is used to provide coverage for each individual sub-component.

Integration testing is the testing of the integration between multiple software programmes. Integration is the process of assembling software or parts into one whole. For software, it means connecting the different modules. Integration tests are an important part of the testing cycle.

If the product is being delivered piecemeal, these tests will prove that the components work together. A well-built integration test suite can also help find new bugs early in the process.

The difference between Unit testing and Integration testing

Unit testing	Integration testing
The unit test is used to test a single module of a system for some sort of specific test.	Integration testing ensures that the module or program works together in a set.
It is performed once the programmer builds the program, tests the code, and believes that there is no error in that code.	It is conducted by the analyst or programmer, and they take responsibility for the cause of the error.
The unit test ensures that the program must perform the task or function that was originally defined for it.	This testing ensures that the link and the program interfaces work properly.
First, the program is developed, the tester verifies that it is error-free, and then the unit test is performed.	The procedure for the integration testing is the same as that of unit testing; here, also, tests are developed, and then, according to the tests, cases are developed.