That's true. I probably used brittle in the wrong sense there. What I mean is that after any code change that isn't a strict refactoring you will inevitably ha

That's true. I probably used brittle in the wrong sense there. What I mean is that after any code change that isn't a strict refactoring you will inevitably have to touch one or more unit tests. If you're adding new functionality, you need to test different code paths; if you change existing functionality, you need to update the related test(s); if you're fixing a bug, you need to add a unit test that reproduces it, and so on. All this means is that unit tests take the most effort to maintain, so I'm not sure why the article claims they have "high" maintainability, or that that's a good thing. In contrast, higher-level tests usually require less maintenance, assuming they're stable and not flaky, since you're not touching them as often. > Very few tests I see are actually unit tests in the above sense, many people only write integration tests because the code under test is structured in inherently un- or difficult- to test ways. Very true. I think the recent popularization of alternative guidelines like The Testing Trophy is precisely because developers are too lazy to properly structure their code to make pure unit testing possible, and see the work of maintaining unit tests as too much of a chore, so they make up arguments that there's no value in them. This couldn't be farther from the truth, and is IMO an irresponsible way to approach software development.