Comment by int_19h
6 years ago
In my opinion, the only thing that is valuable about unit tests is more appropriately captured in form of function, class and module contracts (as in "design by contract"). Unfortunately very few languages are adopting DbC.
Functional tests now, that's another matter. But a lot of TDD dogmatism is centered on unit tests specifically. And that results in a lot of code being written that doesn't actually contribute to the product, and that is there solely that you can chop up the product into tiny bits and unit test them separately. Then on the test side you have tons of mocks etc. I've seen several codebases where test code far exceeded the actual product code in complexity - and that's not a healthy state of affairs.
In more recent times I've seen some growth in interest around contract testing. Unit tests are immensely more useful when paired with contract tests, but unfortunately without them they tend to be more of a hassle. At its essence integrations are a form of a contract, but those suffer their own problems. In rspec you have 'instance_double' which is a form of a contract test as well, but not really sufficient for proper testing IMO. The current state from what I've seen is a little lackluster, but I wouldn't be surprised to see a growth in contract testing libraries for a variety of languages popping up.