[specialk]

If you don't have that much time to write tests I'd recommend integration tests. Then at least you have some tests. Treat integration tests as smoke tests. If there is smoke then you can start looking for the fire. Integration tests are always better then no tests at all. At least they tell you there is a fire even if it is vague in telling you where it is.

[michaelmcmillan]

As someone who always writes unit tests before any production code, I don't know how I would have the time to not write tests. It drives the design and reduces time debugging by a ridiculous amount. I work with information systems though, might be different for other fields.

[lmm]

Since I've switched to a language with a richer type system (Scala) I've found a lot of what I used to do with unit tests can go into the type level instead (see e.g. http://spin.atomicobject.com/2014/12/09/typed-language-tdd-p... - but in Scala the techniques are a lot less verbose to apply).

[michaelmcmillan]

I am most familiar with Javascript & Python, but I think you're onto something having fiddled with Java for 6 months or so. Some logic obviously can't be replaced with only a rich type system, but a lot can.