Re: That nagging feeling and the little voice in the back of your head

However what I did not do was write a test case to prove it was fixed or know that one of the developers had already downloaded a copy of the buggy code (during that 4 hour or so window) which promptly stomped on the bug fix when it got committed.

CVS?

Adding insult to injury, I once fixed a bug and added a unit test, only to have both overwritten.

But that's a rarity. 99%+ of the time, adding a unit test pays off not only in detected when one particular problem regresses, but also in catching problems as they percolate. The last few times I tracked down problems in a medium-sized J2EE application, I started by running the full set of unit tests. By resolving any failing tests first, even if the tests seemed to have nothing to do with the symptoms we were seeing, problems seemed to voluntary step forward waving surrender flags.

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