Developer testing done early in the software's lifecycle is known to have a
high positive impact on application quality, since this is the phase where
finding and fixing bugs is cheapest, easiest, and fastest. Ideally, coding
standard checking and unit testing would be done on every piece of code
before it was added to a team's code base. However, this is not always
practical. Many organizations don't give developers the time and resources
needed for this testing. Moreover, most organizations don't develop
applications "from scratch" by writing new code for all required
functionality. Rather, they typically make incremental enhancements to a
large amount of functioning legacy code, or add their own code to extend
third-party or Open Source packages. The resulting code bases could include
legacy code written by the organization, code obtained via a
merger/acquisiti... (more)