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Comment by chuckm | Hacker News Reader

It seems like you're still using some form of automation to find bugs, regardless of whether these would be classified as unit tests, correct?

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Sure, some of the monitoring systems I've written do some fairly detailed testing. For example, I wrote the Justin.TV chat system. There's a group of bots that periodically log in to the production chat server, send messages to each other, and email me if anything doesn't work.

That's certainly not unit testing though.

do they ever say anything interesting to eachother?

heh, no they're awfully dull - they just say things like "testing 123" and "received 'testing 123' from bot456".

I speak only for myself, but I would say the following: The real key is fully automated testing, no matter how it is done. The finer the grain, the better, generally. Matching an actual business case is near ideal.

Fully automated is necessary so you can run them frequently, automatically, near-continuously.

But beyond that, I think you get into religious territory, and I think people getting dogmatic about the definition of "unit test" tends to mistake definition for virtue (a common failing). If you've got automated testing, great! You win. Doesn't matter how it works.

Or, rather, it does matter, but only within your context, which nobody else is really competent to judge you on.

Yeah, the only thing that matters to me is whether the pro-unit testing position has become more religious or whether the anti-unit testing position has become more religious. I'll take whatever seems serious. I liked what Joel Spolsky had to say yesterday but I disagree with the linked blog post today.

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