The units tell you tons. They just don't tell you the whole story. Trust me, try complex distributed systems testing in an environment the underlying services t

The units tell you tons. They just don't tell you the whole story. Trust me, try complex distributed systems testing in an environment the underlying services themselves are bug-prone and issuing stack traces all over because of poor fencing/bounds checking/et al. You may think that way now regarding mocking the database, but where you will find yourself down the line is trying to devise a functional system integration test case for a slightly esoteric condition (deadlocks, timeouts). It's nice to have the scaffolding of a unit testing framework with robust mocks for those situations. Edit: also, you should consider a gitflow workflow (dev -> integration -> master/stable) and make feature branch off of dev to insulate your master.