The Maintainability of Unit Tests

This: You have no idea how few unit tests I've written, yet world hasn't ended. Be practical, not religious.

2010 discussion repeatedly arose around the idea that unit tests hinder your ability to refactor and add new features. It's true that tests are invaluable when refactoring the internals of a class as long as the interface doesn't change. However, when the interface does change, updating the associated tests is often the vast majority of the effort. Additionally, if a refactoring changes the interaction between two or more classes, the vast majority of the time is spent fixing tests, for several classes. In my experience, making the interface or interaction change often takes 15-20% of the time, while changing the associated tests take the other 80-85%. When the effort is split that drastically, people begin to ask questions. Should I write Unit Tests? The answer at speakerconf was: Probably, but I'm interested in hearing other options. Ayende proposed that scenario based t...

Full article: http://blog.jayfields.com/2010/02/maintainability-of-unit...