[Myrmornis]

My experience is that the advocacy of TDD in introductory programming courses is leading people to think that the way you test software is with unit tests only. It's not, by far the most important mode of testing software is manual testing: test out your changes as you make them and ensure that the thing appears, at least superficially, to be acting as it is supposed to. There is no point beavering away at unit tests when the thing doesn't even vaguely do what it's supposed to do in manual testing.

[afarrell]

For things that have a clean interface, isn't it better to write a higher-level integration test rather than relying on manual testing?

Or at least to write an integration test to mimic the manual test so that you can refactor without having to correctly remember what manual test you did?

[Myrmornis]

Yes, agreed. It’s the obsession with early unit testing that I’m taking issue with.