There's some truth to this, but it's also possible that the team just wasn't very good at writing tests. It's not easy to do well. Changes will break tests, but

There's some truth to this, but it's also possible that the team just wasn't very good at writing tests. It's not easy to do well. Changes will break tests, but given that changes are applied one at a time (you're not erasing your ./src folder, dumping in new code and expecting all your tests to pass), then it should be possible to keep the tests up to date. If a few changes break many tests, then tests might be over-specifying, not making use of factories, testing too much, or a lot of ways that are easy to get it wrong. I've seen and heard this a lot, and it's often the result of code that does too much (not cohesive, too much coupling) and tests that correspondingly do too much.