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Discussion on: What are the alternatives to unit tests?

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Frank Carr

One of the important things that unit tests will do is to get you focused on SOLID, most notably single responsibility. It reduces the temptation to write "Swiss army knife" functions or massive blocks of if..else or switch..case code. When you work in short blocks of testable code it makes debugging so much easier. Likewise, if you find tests becoming elaborate, maybe some refactoring is needed.

When you're working on a team, having the unit test gives other developers a guide as to how a particular function should work. If they come up with use cases you didn't anticipate, it provides an easy way for them to communicate it. When you're primarily working on the backend, it gives you something to demo in the sprint retrospective/demo.

When debugging issues unit tests make it easier to locate problem areas both in integration testing and in production. Without having this testing you can spin your wheels trying to find bugs.

Alternatives to unit tests? I've had to do these when working with legacy code where there were no tests originally written. Usually, these tests were in the form of one-off sandbox applications that would exercise a particular function or set of functions, trying to track down a bug. I've found this to be more inefficient than writing tests to begin with, particularly when trying to deal with critical production problems.