[bicijay]

We can't even have a consensus on what "unit" tests really are... Every company i work for has a different meaning for it. Some places consider a test "unit" when all the dependencies are mocked, some places consider a whole feature a "unit".

[bedobi]

Kent Beck (the originator of test-driven development) defines a unit test as "a test that runs in isolation from other tests". This is very different from the popular and completely misguided definition of a unit test as "a test that tests a class/method in isolation from other classes/methods".

But it doesn't really matter if you want to call a given test an "integration" test or a "unit" test. The point of any test is to fail when something breaks and pass when something works, even if the implementation is changed. If it does the opposite in either of those cases, it's not a good test.

[troupo]

Kent Beck also said [0] "I get paid for code that works, not for tests, so my philosophy is to test as little as possible to reach a given level of confidence"

[0] https://stackoverflow.com/a/153565

[randomdata]

> The point of any test is to fail when something breaks and pass when something works

The point of any test is to document API expectations for future developers (which may include you).

That the documentation happens to be self-validating is merely a nice side effect.

[marcosdumay]

I'd rather drop the useless prefix instead of trying to fix it.

[mdgrech23]

I get the logic from the mocking camp e.g. we're not here to test this dependency we're just here to test this function/method whatever but when you mock you end up making assumptions about how that dependency works. This is how you end up w/ the case of all my tests are green and production is broke.

I think it's hard to beat e2e testing. The thing is e2e tests are expensive to write and maintain and in my opinion you really need a software engineer to write them and write them well. Now manual e2e testing is cheap and can be outsourced. All the companies I've worked for in the US have had testing departments and they did manage to write a few tests but they were developers and so to be frank they were really bad at writing them. They did probably 80 or 90% of their testing manually. At that point who we kidding. Just say you do manual testing, pay your people accordingly and move on.