I am not actually against unit tests, but I have seen it being taken to unhealthy extremes. For example at some companies there are automated tools that check that every method has a unit test. In the end people write unit tests for Java getter and setters and so on. Mind numbing as that task is, people also end up writing bad unit tests just to silence the tool.
A lot of unit tests make sense, but I suspect they also offer plenty of opportunities for idling time away.
No question, it's a fine line . . . you need to be pragmatic and ask "is writing and maintaining this test going to save me more time than it costs?" Over several years, the maintenance of the tests themselves becomes a huge cost, which is something the TDD guys don't seem to talk about much. (My turn for an overly-cynical guess: since many of them are consultants as you've pointed out, they don't hang around with the same code and the same tests for 7 years, so they don't necessarily see how it really plays out). "Bad tests" are actually a huge net negative for development.
If the test is testing something (like a getter or setter) with basically no chance of breaking, then it's a waste of time. If the test is likely to be fragile or non-deterministic, it's a waste of time. If the test is just too hard to write, and it's not too hard to just test by hand, then automating it is probably a waste of time and you should just QA it by hand every so often.
Finding the right balance tends to come back to the old experience and skill thing: you need to have some intuition about which tests will give you the most value (because that part needs to be rock-solid, or because it's hard to get right, or because it's high-change) and which tests need to be thrown away or never written because they aren't worth it.
Taking any development process too far tends to work out poorly, and taking any metric (like test coverage) too seriously is always a bad idea. That said, I've rarely seen unit testing taken way too far; not testing enough and ending up with buggy, regression-riddled software is a far more common failure mode.
This is why it might be an idea to have unit tests AND QA. Be pragmatic with the unit tests and center them around core functionality and things that are hard to test (think very hard about race conditions for example). QA if they're any good should catch the boneheaded exceptions (such as a mis-behaving getter that calls itself).
Comments
I am not actually against unit tests, but I have seen it being taken to unhealthy extremes. For example at some companies there are automated tools that check that every method has a unit test. In the end people write unit tests for Java getter and setters and so on. Mind numbing as that task is, people also end up writing bad unit tests just to silence the tool.
A lot of unit tests make sense, but I suspect they also offer plenty of opportunities for idling time away.
No question, it's a fine line . . . you need to be pragmatic and ask "is writing and maintaining this test going to save me more time than it costs?" Over several years, the maintenance of the tests themselves becomes a huge cost, which is something the TDD guys don't seem to talk about much. (My turn for an overly-cynical guess: since many of them are consultants as you've pointed out, they don't hang around with the same code and the same tests for 7 years, so they don't necessarily see how it really plays out). "Bad tests" are actually a huge net negative for development.
If the test is testing something (like a getter or setter) with basically no chance of breaking, then it's a waste of time. If the test is likely to be fragile or non-deterministic, it's a waste of time. If the test is just too hard to write, and it's not too hard to just test by hand, then automating it is probably a waste of time and you should just QA it by hand every so often.
Finding the right balance tends to come back to the old experience and skill thing: you need to have some intuition about which tests will give you the most value (because that part needs to be rock-solid, or because it's hard to get right, or because it's high-change) and which tests need to be thrown away or never written because they aren't worth it.
Taking any development process too far tends to work out poorly, and taking any metric (like test coverage) too seriously is always a bad idea. That said, I've rarely seen unit testing taken way too far; not testing enough and ending up with buggy, regression-riddled software is a far more common failure mode.
This is why it might be an idea to have unit tests AND QA. Be pragmatic with the unit tests and center them around core functionality and things that are hard to test (think very hard about race conditions for example). QA if they're any good should catch the boneheaded exceptions (such as a mis-behaving getter that calls itself).