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Comment by DannoHung | Hacker News Reader

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DannoHung·

In my experience building backend apps, unit tests are way more effective at catching logic bugs than end to end tests.

End to end tests are great for catching connectivity bugs though.

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UIs tend to have a ton of connectivity and little logic/computation.

An added benefit of using unit tests over integration tests is that unit tests shows you what went wrong very clearly. If an integration test fails I have literally no idea where to start hunting for the bug. It could be located at any level in the stack.

I highly recommend this brilliant talk by J.B Rainsberger on how integration tests are a scam: https://vimeo.com/80533536

If you don't have that much time to write tests I'd recommend integration tests. Then at least you have some tests. Treat integration tests as smoke tests. If there is smoke then you can start looking for the fire. Integration tests are always better then no tests at all. At least they tell you there is a fire even if it is vague in telling you where it is.

As someone who always writes unit tests before any production code, I don't know how I would have the time to not write tests. It drives the design and reduces time debugging by a ridiculous amount. I work with information systems though, might be different for other fields.

Since I've switched to a language with a richer type system (Scala) I've found a lot of what I used to do with unit tests can go into the type level instead (see e.g. http://spin.atomicobject.com/2014/12/09/typed-language-tdd-p... - but in Scala the techniques are a lot less verbose to apply).

I am most familiar with Javascript & Python, but I think you're onto something having fiddled with Java for 6 months or so. Some logic obviously can't be replaced with only a rich type system, but a lot can.

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