I'm not sure we disagree about the purpose and utility of tests. I certainly was not complaining about tests. If anything, I was complaining that too often, in

I'm not sure we disagree about the purpose and utility of tests. I certainly was not complaining about tests. If anything, I was complaining that too often, in my experience at least, it seems to be presented as an undeniable truism that, generically, 'tests' are always a benefit, and usually the more tests the better. My point is that tests (at least, unit/integration tests of the variety usually mentioned in TDD) are more code that has to be maintained (and designed, and debugged). They incur overhead and as such impinge on development resources. As a result tests introduce the need for considering tradeoffs between developing tests and developing the software product itself. Simply writing tests for the sake of having tests to test code is naive; at least as naive as assuming that once working a given piece of code works forever, but it is a mistake that I've witnessed on more than one occasion.