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Discussion on: How I learned to love unit testing

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Ste Griffiths

That's a great point Ravern, and I feel you - I've had the same thing. I think that you don't need to unit test things that are:

  • Features of an underlying dependency
  • Basic CRUD pipelines which don't alter or transform the data

But anything in your solution which is unique or original could be unit tested. For example:

  • Do you have data transfer objects which construct on top of data from another source? Test that they instantiate with the expected values
  • Do you parse/process/transform API data? Unit test your assumptions about that

Straightforward API projects often do some of the above.

That said, unit testing is a helper, not a law! Test what it's helpful to test. Your end-to-end testing sounds like it provides a lot of value, and perhaps in many cases that's all you need!