[orib]

Of course it doesn't make software worse, but you make it sound like it's the only factor in software quality. Far from it, and IMO the degree to which it has become a religion is disturbing. I suspect that might be the source of the downmods.

I've seen projects with more tests than code, and I think that shows a problem with development methodologies. Simply reasoning about the flow through the code (and possibly using a powerful type system [think Ocaml] to help catch errors at compile time) would remove the need for many of these tests (not all tests should go, of course) and would result in tighter code.

[qwph]

Yeah, if you have more tests than actual code, that would seem to indicate something's gone wrong somewhere. And I'd agree that no amount of testing is going to turn an O(n) algorithm into an O(log n) one. There's no substitute for sitting down with a pen and paper and doing some old fashioned design sometimes.

I do think having a suite of repeatable test cases you can run against developing software is a useful thing to have, though. Not only can you test for correctness, but you can also run benchmarks against each modification to see if your performance or memory usage is going up or down.

It probably depends on what you're trying to do...