Word. I have also worked on projects where existing tests were treated like holy cows. Deleting a test wasn't disallowed as such but it really required a convincing justification. Ironically, this made it especially hard to touch the inevitable subset of tests which had grown unreadable and which were not tracable to specs. Hence, they were often left alone, smelling riper with each passing year.

I like to think of production code as being inherently a liability, not an asset, and the same goes for test code. That's not to say that code, or tests, cannot be valuable; it's just that every line of code carries a cost to the business just by adding complexity to the development process and by taking up disk space and CPU cycles. Not all code offsets this cost, and a lot of tests certainly don't.

We should stop viewing tests like holy scriptures. Some add long term value, some add value during initial development, some should never have been written in the first place.

And on a side note, our tests should test the business requirements, i.e. they should be tracable to specs. There are a lot of tests out there which amount to little more than to "test" some arbitrary decisions which we made when someone initially fleshed out a class diagram.