It never was a silver bullet to begin with. There is no way that unit testing could cover every ground. Granted, for what its worth, it is something that is rea

It never was a silver bullet to begin with. There is no way that unit testing could cover every ground. Granted, for what its worth, it is something that is reasonably cheap that you could run over and over again cheaply. Functional testing can cover most of the cases, but its more costly, requiring a full system setup, takes longer time to run and more expensive to write. Manual testing seems straightforward, but its not repeatable, hence more expensive, since it requires warm bodies to run it every single time. Given the effectiveness and the cost of each approach, it makes more sense to have different coverage for different test. For something that is more expensive, you would choose to create and run it for the most important part of the system. For something that is dirt cheap, well, why not just run it everywhere? Consider regression test. It covers every part of the system. But its not possible to run it every single time a developer change something. The cost is too prohibitive to run it at every changes, even with automation, much less using the manual approach. What about unit test? Dirt cheap. You can run it every 15 minutes or so if you are inclined and it would still be okay. I would say that it is wrong to start a software development exercise and just religiously say we have use TDD. The right question to ask, is what is your of degree quality and what is the cost that you are willing to pay. For some people, hey, lets just hire rock star developers for everything, but some projects cannot afford that. And if can only afford a team that barely knows what unit testing is, there is not much point of training everyone for a short project (say, 3 months with 1 month warranty). And yeah, there is limited benefit with unit testing (as is with everything), but still I don't think its fair to throw the baby into the bathwater too soon either. Do what make sense and do what works.