Unit-testing questions on-topic?

Question

There is a large overlap in test automation question over stackoverflow.com (SO), Software Engineering.SE (SE.SE) and SQA.SE. Selenium, unit-testing, TDD, BDD and other test-automation topics questions are asked on all three sites.

Recently more unit-testing questions (1,2) are asked here on SQA.SE. Although I am fine with this I do wonder if this is the best site to ask these questions. They would better fit the SE.SE as they have more developers.

I would argue that Unit-tests are more about coding than about testing. The goal of unit-testing is not mainly testing. The main benefits are that you can refactor classes and make sure your code-base does not resist change.

I expect questions like this asked on SQA.SE will receive less answers. Also it will generate more high-level answers from a testing perspective. While I think the askers are looking for more in-depth details from a code perspective.

• Should we close these as off-topic and migrate them to SE.SE instead?
• Or should we attract more developers?

Answer 1

Some aspects of unit testing may be more appropriate here than others. For example, questions about unit-testing frameworks like JUnit or TestNG belong here. On the other hand, questions about "how do I unit-test X" can cross the line.

Answer 2

It would not be appropriate to say that it's off-topic here. They are definitely on topic here. I think you'll find there are a lot of developers lurking around here. In fact, my first question was around how to unit test a legacy application and it was quite well received (although some of that may have been sympathy for how terrible of a situation that system was in ;-)

There's nothing wrong with a site overlap. However, SE sites should always base their decisions of what is on and off topic around what is good or bad for their site. It's the only site in the equation. Otherwise, we'd just have a bunch of tags and one single site.