Lean Testing or Why Unit Tests Are Worse Than You Think
The article makes some fair points for performing end-to-end tests. There is however a benefit of unit tests over end-to-end tests that is not mentioned: code locality. The cost of fixing a discovered bug seems to grow exponentially with the amount of code in which the bug may appear. Unit tests typically cover a small part of the code. If a unit test fails, isolating and fixing the bug is typically cheap. On the other hand, if an end-to-end test fails (due to the same bug) then isolating and fixing the bug can be quite costly because there are many different parts of the code that need to be checked. To me, code locality is the main advantage of writing unit tests.<p>At the end of the day, there is a spectrum of tests going from unit tests to end-to-end tests. The spectrum represents several trade-offs such code locality vs. coverage. In my experience, the most economical approach is to write a balanced mix of tests the lie along this spectrum.