This sounds like the article should be against brittle testing. If any of the following is true then you're writing brittle tests: - Your test code looks like

This sounds like the article should be against brittle testing. If any of the following is true then you're writing brittle tests: - Your test code looks like the code under test - Your test suite includes examples that tweak one parameter and assert a result - Your tests pass when you delete an arbitrary line of code from the implementation I can't imagine shipping any significant project without any tests. How would I know that what I wrote implements my specifications faithfully? Hand waving and trust? Unit tests are proof by example. They're trivial and don't prove the absence of errors. So I use them sparingly for simple, pure code where a few assumptions are enough. Property tests are where I spend more of my time and focus. I generate the tests from a specification of a property I want to ensure will hold. It's not a formal proof that there are no errors but if my code survives 500 generated test cases and I have a good distribution over expected and hostile input I can be satisfied that my code is correct. I don't spend time writing unit tests for effectful code. If I have business logic that is tied up calling a lot of APIs and digging into databases I defunctionalize the effect handling code and write interpreters for the data structures instead so that testing is still pure and easy and the effect handling code is constrained and found in one place. I test the pure version to makes sure the interpreter receives the correct sequence of data. Sometimes I will use gold tests for serialization code. If I need to make sure that a contract I have with an external system isn't broken by my changes to the code I make sure to run the tests that will check what gets serialized out matches up with the golden examples. If I need to ensure certain temporal properties hold like resource usage and performance... well I'll need regression and load tests. These are all a part of the development process. You can ship code with no tests but good luck refactoring, maintaining, fixing, and understanding that code a year from now. It's possible, don't get me wrong, but it takes extreme discipline and even then that sometimes fails. People get tired, leave, get bored, etc. Having the computer check for you that everything is still working as expected is essential in my books.