If you are into Unit Testing and haven't yet heard of MXUnit, I definitely recommend giving it a whirl. Some things that stand out for me, thus far in my evaluation, are the simple, but extensible, assertions, the ecplise plugin, and the debug output. One gotcha that has come up for people when using the eclipse plugin, is that is was designed assuming that the package path to your components resolves directly from your web root. For people who run separate server instances, virtual machines, or develop locally with Apache virtual hosts, this is a show stopper. Luckily, for folks, like myself, who prefer to develop locally with Apache, getting the MXUnit eclipse plugin to work is simply a matter of adding a couple of Alias directives to your vhost.

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If you wonder about Unit Testing and Test Driven Development, but are afraid of commitment, do yourself a favour, read Terrance Ryan's thoughts on "How to convince yourself to Unit Test". A couple of months ago, I made a commitment to start unit testing. I'll admit that it took a little while to wrap my head around the terminology and process. A good practice point for me was to run some of my first CFCs though Seth Petry-Johnson's var scope checker. When I discovered a plethora of un-scoped vars, I used the opportunity to write tests against the methods I was going to change. After only a few tests, I started to get this warm feeling of security. By the time my updates and tests were complete, I had a nice little suite that I could return to any time a change was required.

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