Funny thing is, the most frequent positive result of tests for me hasn't even been mentioned, I don't believe. The biggest benefit I got was an ongoing educatio

Funny thing is, the most frequent positive result of tests for me hasn't even been mentioned, I don't believe. The biggest benefit I got was an ongoing education about how the program I was writing ACTUALLY functioned - enabling me to correct my assumptions before the shit hit the fan. This isn't quite the same as catching errors, since often you still want the algorithm you wrote as you wrote it, but knowing more about what's really going on gives you a heads up to avoid future problems, conflicts, etc. Of course, you may program differently. I was always big on asserts back in the day, and two-thirds of my debugging (by instance not hours) was spent fixing asserts, and thereby learning that some assumption I was making about the program, was wrong at least some of the time. Always good to know.