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>> Well enough written unit tests can be used as documentation of an application's design!

That sounds really cool. Is there an open source project that you respect that has achieved this, that you can point me to? I'd like to look at it.

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While a test suite gives you a collection of examples of use, it doesn't tell you the intended purpose and motivation for the software, why it is designed the way it is, provide any argument for correctness or best-, typical- and worst-case performance, or discuss what trade-offs were made, and why. It is often hard to divine the underlying rules from a set of examples, and they don't go out of their way to point out which are the corner cases. There is a great deal of information in the design of any non-trivial piece of software that is not efficiently expounded by tests.

Have a look at the unit tests for the components and services in https://github.com/smaato/ui-framework. We designed the test suites to explore and explain how the interface of each module works. So reading the tests is one way to get a feel for how each module is designed to be used.

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