http://qs1969.pair.com?node_id=401469


in reply to Refactoring makes unit tests obsolete

I'm on the edge of this whole unit test thing. It's not that unit tests are bad, they aren't, but for certain applications ... say systems monitoring and GUI apps (not always Perl), it's incredibly hard to write good unit tests. Small code (i.e. modules) can have unit tests pretty easily, large apps can be a challenge.

Furthermore, unit tests can help find problems, but fully successful unit tests can lead to false positives. You still can't test to see if your code will seg fault on RH QU 3 ... no matter what you do.

Meanwhile, if you are only unit testing your external API's, yes those API's shouldn't break when refactoring things. But if you are testing internal API's, well, it's ok to break those!