tl;dr I made it to "Testing does not increase quality; programming and design do" and quit. It seems clear that the author has a strong opinion on this and per

tl;dr I made it to "Testing does not increase quality; programming and design do" and quit. It seems clear that the author has a strong opinion on this and perhaps that has been formed by exposure to unit tests done wrong. I suppose his article is worth reviewing and asking if any of my unit tests suffer from the problems he identified. I think most of his complaints relate to badly applied unit tests and I think we can all agree that any methodology can be badly applied. That does not provide grounds to condemn the methodology. Having used Fortran (and Macro-11) as the first languages I employed professionally, I do not recall any thrust for unit testing at that time. Maybe it was just the shop I worked in. More recently I have used unit tests for Go, C/C++, Python, Perl, Java, shell scripts and probably some I'm forgetting. I wouldn't consider coding anything w/out some kind of unit test. Back to the quote "Testing does not increase quality; programming and design do", I disagree vehemently with the claim that testing does not increase quality. While true that one cannot 'test in' quality, I find that designing code to be testable provides higher quality results. This is particularly true in languages such as shell scripts that often start small and grow until they are hundreds of lines of in-line code. Testable code is generally better partitioned and structured than it would otherwise be. A second benefit to unit testing is immediate feedback and completion of parts of the system. I get a feeling of accomplishment when I complete something that passes its tests and prefer that to deferring satisfaction until the entire thing works. Finally, if I test the bits in isolation, I can provide them data for all of the corner cases I think could cause trouble and make sure they work for a wider range of inputs than could easily be done during integration testing. When I do get to the point where I put the bits together, I have a much higher success rate with integration testing.