The thing that drives me nuts about these threads is that people vastly overestimate their ability to write code that isn't broken. I distrust myself, and ther

The thing that drives me nuts about these threads is that people vastly overestimate their ability to write code that isn't broken. I distrust myself, and therefore I write basic unit tests which validate the code I've written to prove that I haven't screwed up. Such unit tests are quick to write and don't change frequently because they run against low-level building blocks — so they are not a major maintenance burden. The ROI on this kind of testing is very high. I don't like being told by Dodds and these other unit-test haters that I shouldn't be doing this. In my experience, organizations suffer much more when developers eschew such tests, being quite naturally overly optimistic about the reliability of their work. Writing low-level unit tests doesn't prevent you from writing integration or end-to-end tests, and those are important too. I'm not here to devalue higher-level testing, and I'd appreciate it if advocates for higher-level testing likewise didn't go out of their way to devalue unit tests.