Comment by jerf
6 days ago
For people who aren't getting the value of unit tests, this is my intro to the idea. You had to do some sort of testing on your code. At its core, the concept of unit testing is just, what if instead of throwing away that code, you kept it?
To the extent that other concerns get in the way of the concept, like the general difficulty of testing that GUIs do what they are supposed to do, I don't blame the concept of unit testing; I blame the techs that make the testing hard.
I also think that this is a great way to emphasis their value.
If anything I'd only keep those if it's hard to write them, if people push back against it (and I myself don't like them sometimes, e.g. when the goal is just to push up the coverage metric but without actually testing much, which only add test code to maintain but no real testing value...).
Like any topic there's no universal truth and lots of ways to waste time and effort, but this specifically is extremely practical and useful in a very explicit manner: just fix it once and catch it the next time before production. Massively reduce the chance one thing has to be fixed twice or more.
I can't count how many times when other people ask me "how can I use this API?", I just send a test case to them. Best example you can give to someone that is never out of sync.