Fresh out of University, eager to start my career I was naiive. I was sure I would follow best practices. I had read great books by Martin Fowler on refactoring and Michael Feathers on legacy code. I was also sure that companies desired programmers to use best practices.

However, the harsh reality was and is that most computer places do not place an emphasis on best practices, code reviews or testing at all. Most managers and programmers are concerned more with the immediate overhead it creates and do not understand the usefulness when modifying code and debugging later.

Writing unit tests is not easy. And a lot of people, including me, do it the wrong way - with minimal return, get frustrated and give up. If you are not using TDD from the onset of a project or inheriting a legacy project, incorporating test can be daunting.

But deep down, I know that unit tests will help tremendously. So I am giving testing another go around. I have found that tools are much easier than I had remember. Netbeans has JUnit support built in. Mockito apparently generates mock objects very easily (though I do not know how to effectively use them yet).

A book that has had high rating and I am currently reading is The Art of Unit Testing.

Wish me luck!