You misunderstand me. I never said that testing is an efficient way to gain confidence, or that tests give much confidence, or that only testing can provide con

You misunderstand me. I never said that testing is an efficient way to gain confidence, or that tests give much confidence, or that only testing can provide confidence. Rather, I said: > The benefit of testing is confidence that things are working. Some people treat testing as a gamified metric (e.g. code coverage). Some people treat tests as executable documentation. Some people treat tests as some essential requirement, without which the software cannot be shipped. I'm saying that those are not good reasons to write tests. Tests should be written to give us confidence that things are working. How much confidence will we gain? How much do we want? How much will it cost? Where should our efforts be directed? Those vary from project to project, and is exactly why I say thought should be given to the cost/benefit tradeoff. (Personally I think automated testing can be an efficient way to quickly gain a lot of confidence in a system; especially if we do property checking of high-level functionality, instead of unit testing of low-level details. However, that's a separate point; we can disagree on that, whilst agreeing on the need for weighing costs versus benefits.)