A book claiming to include best practices wouldn't be complete if it didn't cover perhaps the most important best practice of all: testing. You'll probably agree that most developers begin with good intentions, but when push comes to shove, testing efforts are often reduced to a couple of simple test cases done on the fly. I've been there many times myself. What I've learned over the years, however, is that conducting proper tests is not only essential to building quality software, but it also saves time! That's right—it actually saves time by catching bugs earlier in development before they get buried so deep that it takes days just to replicate the bug, let alone the time it takes to fix it. This chapter will discuss proper testing techniques along with a primer on using the JUnit testing framework.