I find unit tests to be _most_ useful in very particular cases: When a given function I'm writing has a set of input/outputs that I'm going for. Various items like parsing a URL into various components, or writing a class that must match a particular interface. I need to make sure the function works anyway, so I can either test it manually, or I can take a few extra moments and commit those test cases to version control.
For more complex items, I'm much more interested in higher level black-box integration tests.
That's a great example of why unit testing is mostly useless.
Having an expected/input output set when writing something like a parser is standard practice. Turning that set into unit tests is worthless for a few reasons.
1: You will design your code to make them all pass. A unit test is useless if it always passes. When your test framework comes back saying x/x (100%) of tests have passed, you are receiving ZERO information as to the validity of your system.
2: You wrote the unit tests with the same assumptions, biases, and limitations as the code they're testing. If you have a fundamental misunderstanding of what the system should do, it will manifest in both the code and the test. This is true of most unit tests - they are tautological.
3: While doing all of the above and achieving almost zero additional utility, you had to fragment your logic in a way that easily yields itself to unit testing. More than likely, that's not the most readable or understandable way said code could have been written. You sacrificed clarity for unit testability. Metrics like test code coverage unintentionally steer developers to writing unreadable tangled code.
The only use case for unit testing here would be if this parser was a component that gets frequently updated by many people or a component that gets implemented anew for different configurations. But at this point i'm just talking about regression testing, and there are many ways to do that other than unit testing.
You're complaint about always passing only makes sense if you ignore negative tests. Good tests will also test that bad/incorrect input results in predictable behaviour - e.g. invalid input into a parser doesn't parse.
> While doing all of the above and achieving almost zero additional utility, you had to fragment your logic in a way that easily yields itself to unit testing
Another way to consider it is that unit testing forces you to structure your code to be more composeable which is a win. The amount of intrusive access/changes you need to avail test-code is language-dependent.
> The only use case for unit testing here would be if this parser was a component that gets frequently updated by many people or a component that gets implemented anew for different configurations. But at this point i'm just talking about regression testing, and there are many ways to do that other than unit testing.
And yet successful large-scale projects like LLVM use unit-testing. Not exclusively but it's a part of their overall strategy to ensure code quality. Sure, for very small-scale projects with a few constant team members it can be overkill. Those aren't particularly interesting scenarios because you're facing fewer organizational challenges. The fact of the matter is that despite all the hand-wringing about how it's not useful, unit tests are the inevitable addition to any codebase that has a non-trivial number of contributors, changes and/or lines of code.
The applicability of unit testing to your particular cases varies greatly across languages & runtimes.
For URL parsing, some runtimes/frameworks have that thing already implemented. E.g. in .NET the Uri class allows getting scheme/host/port/path/segments, and there’s a separate ParseQueryString utility method to parse query part of the URI.
To ensure a class conforms to an interface, the majority of strongly-types OO languages have interfaces in their type systems. If you’ll use that but fail to implement an interface or some parts of it, you code just won’t compile.
For more complex items, I'm much more interested in higher level black-box integration tests.