[Klathmon]

It's a trade off of when you want to spend the time.

Sure, it's less efficient to write unit tests ahead of time for every case, but in a lot of cases fixing a bug faster when it's discovered is much more important than even double the hours spent during less "pressing" times.

[skohan]

But I think the argument that the article is making is that it's not only the case that you're moving the time spent fixing bugs, (i.e. a greedy vs lazy strategy), the issue is also that the baseline maintenance cost of the code base is increased by orders of magnitude when unit tests are considered.

I tend to agree - in my personal experience in organizations with strict TDD culture, a perverse incentive often emerges to preserve existing flawed architecture over obviously better solutions just because it's so painful to deal with all the tests.

One of software development's most powerful properties is the ability to iterate quickly: it's foolish to prioritize dogmatic beliefs about testing over that quality.

[Klathmon]

Yeah I absolutely agree that in many cases tests become more of burden than a help, but I think that isn't a problem with testing but with it's application.

It's just an extension of your code, if you are going to throw some code away to change an interface, then throw the tests away too. If you are afraid to do that because of the time spent, then you probably spent too much time on writing tests.

While I am dogmatic about tests, I also believe that around 50% code coverage is normally enough in most application codebases. Cover the important parts, the parts that are hard to test manually, the "core" pieces that lots of other areas rely on, and some tests for bugs that you want to prevent happening again.

If you want to quickly iterate, go for it! You shouldn't have all that many tests in the parts you are changing frequently. But to change a core aspect of the codebase, or a really complicated aspect of it, then the extra work of rewriting the tests shouldn't be all that bad.

I'd shorten your last statement. It's foolish to prioritize dogmatic beliefs. Everything has a time and a place, and moderation is key.