

Unit testing is teh suck, Urr. - DeusExMachina
http://www.wilshipley.com/blog/2005/09/unit-testing-is-teh-suck-urr.html

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al_james
Well, unit testing is only really efficient at finding _certain kinds of
bugs_. Its good at protecting your core framework / system from breaking
changes to its API, e.g. an engineer changing the result of a null being
passed into a function. However, against the "I never expected anyone to do
that" type of bugs, its next to useless. Only beta testing will save you
there.

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humbledrone
FTA: "YOUR PROGRAM IS NOT GOING TO BE USED BY OTHER PROGRAMS, it's going to be
used by people"

A lot of programs are, in fact, used by other programs. Such programs are
generally called libraries, and unit testing can be exceptionally useful for
avoiding regressions in them. When testing a library, you can't really get
around writing code, so why not check that code in so you don't have to write
it again?

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msluyter
I used to work in QA and have been a proponent of unit testing generally, but
I tend to agree to some extent. You can't see your blind spots, by definition,
so you need really clever & devious testers to do the oddball test cases that
you never think of. If you can find someone really good at ad hoc testing they
can be quite efficient. Such people are hard to find.

But I also think that certain automated frameworks/tests make life easier for
everyone, if they're managed well. At a minimum, they can serve as a sort of
de facto specification in cases where the system lacks adequate documentation
(which is the case more often than we might like.) And as others have
mentioned, unit tests serve a dual role. Even if they're not great at finding
new bugs, they have some value as regression tests.

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csomar
I agree. The first time when I read about unit testing, I was amazed: This
will find bugs!

But will it? No, I do JavaScript development and unit testing just check the
output of the functions. Most of the time, all I do is DOM manipulation,
function returns special values, problems like Ajax.

Unit testing is really poor.

