Unit testing is not (generally) useful

Re:Unit testing is not (generally) useful by lnguyen on Thursday February 05, 2009 @05:12PM (#468845)

Whenever someone comments on the usefulness of unit testing (or in the extreme, testing in general), I point them to Feynman's contribution to the Challenger shuttle report:

Appendix F - Personal Observations on Reliability of Shuttle http://www.ralentz.com/old/space/feynman-report.html

A good summary is at http://duartes.org/gustavo/blog/post/richard-feynman-challen...

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Re:Unit testing is not (generally) useful by axod on Thursday February 05, 2009 @06:30PM (#468980)

How many people are writing mission critical software? In startups, hardly any.

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Re:Unit testing is not (generally) useful by lnguyen on Thursday February 05, 2009 @08:29PM (#469170)

If you rely on your software to be up and running for your livelihood (aka any web startup), it is mission critical.

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Re:Unit testing is not (generally) useful by axod on Friday February 06, 2009 @06:43AM (#469626)

I disagree completely. A failure might mean you loose a bit of ad revenue, or maybe a customer.

The consequences of a bug are usually very small. It's also very obvious if a bug is causing you pain.

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