3 ms·

I want to be clear I'm not disagreeing with you here. But I would like to point out if you were building a real bridge every component would be inspected indiv

I want to be clear I'm not disagreeing with you here. But I would like to point out if you were building a real bridge every component would be inspected individually. They wouldn't just let you build a whole bridge and do a final load test. Whether that level of robustness/ confidence is important will be highly contextual.

eesmith 7y ago
Yes, and part of the mythos of unit testing - especially around small methods - is based on that real-world analogy, when "this is programming", and many of the rules are quite different. As another analogy, if you breadboard a device you can test each individual component directly. Once it's on a chip, most of those individual tests can no longer be used. That's not to say they can't be tested, only that the testing must be done on a higher interface level. So, do you use those higher-level tests, which are more like intergration tests, or do you write the low-level unit tests and expect to throw the away at any sort of non-trivial code changes?