The Tests Never End: An Overview of Software Testing Methods for Actuaries – Part 1 of 3

Have you ever been involved with a software development project?  One thing that all software development projects have in common is testing.  You may have been involved in some of the testing of these systems or maybe you were in meetings where testing was discussed or perhaps you are interested in doing more testing in the work that you are doing.  You may have heard some terms such as unit testing, integration testing and functional testing but are not sure what the differences are. You may also not work with software development but want to understand elements of software testing so that you can apply them to your actuarial work.

This is the first in a 3-part series where Joe Alaimo and Andy Rallis discuss the different types of testing, what they are, how they are performed and ways that they apply to the software development that actuaries are involved in.  They explain why each method is important, provide examples and discuss tools that can be used to help with testing.

Links to the tools discussed in the podcast:

R:
testthat: a unit testing framework from the Rstudio team who created the popular package eco system Tidyverse

Python:
pytest: a popular and simple unit testing framework in python and it works with other python testing frameworks

Excel/VBA:
Rubberduck: a VBA unit testing framework that can help test VBA code for models written in VBA/Excel