I read this complementary one the other day, and one thing that is readily apparent to me is that a lot of people have a lot of different opinions about testing

I read this complementary one the other day, and one thing that is readily apparent to me is that a lot of people have a lot of different opinions about testing (move to system tests! more unit tests! regression tests!), but many are not asking the zillion dollar question: What are you testing for? This is critical because it basically gives you immediately what you should and should not test, and how. While mindless, dogmatic, metric oriented testing is a waste, testing with higher intent and purpose is extremely useful. An example: test that something working on current vX also works on vA to vW, and when vZ is out, have the answer readily. Or that a biz feature fulfills the requirements. Or that someone not as well versed on intricate details of your piece of ownership will be confident in that piece still working after a simple fix when you’re on vacation. It can be one, some, but probably not all. With that in mind, what to test, what doesn’t make sense to test, and what to test against becomes more clear: should I mock this? or should I run it against some staging environment? Should I perform (yikes? not!) manual testing? The answers are highly dependent on the piece of code being tested. Tests are here to help you answer a question, if you aren’t sure what the question is then your tests will miss the point. https://flak.tedunangst.com/post/against-testing https://flak.tedunangst.com/post/against-testing