This paper has been public for years at <a href="http://rbcs-us.com/documents/Why-Most-Unit-Testing-is-Waste.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://rbcs-us.com/documents/Why-Most-Unit-Testing-is-Waste....</a>
> If you want to reduce your test mass, the number one
thing you should do is look at the tests that have never
failed in a year and consider throwing them away<p>And that's how you get regressions. I get the rationale that these tests cover code which probably never changes, and tests are most useful for code that changes a lot. But if the guy who wrote the code left the company a year ago and then you have to change this code... it's going to be a lot easier if there are good tests.
I'm a bit skeptical of a paper written by a consulting company that specializes in QA services and training. Understanding a codebase well enough to write useful unit tests is very time consuming and difficult. Teaching devs the same requires domain, development and process skills. Other forms of testing (e.g. end-to-end, browser based, and manual) are much easier for an outside organization to apply based on rules in a BRD or user manual. It stands to reason that a company would write a white paper that nudges customers to a methodology that favors them.
the programming people i admire most just randomly seem to be the same people who never write angry rants about programming topics.<p>took me 20 years to notice this.
<i>When I was programming on a daily basis, I did make code for testability purposes but I hardly wrote any unit tests. However I was renowned for my code quality and my nearly bug free software. I like to investigate WHY did this work for me?</i><p>This made me giggle.
It's like magic. don't write tests, don't find bugs....