<i>I mean, I don&#x27;t have to repeat things that have been known for ages - just buy some old books, it&#x27;s all in there!</i><p>I don&#x27;t really understand this point. UnitTest and SUnit, that all subsequent unit testing frameworks are based on, were released in about 1990. &quot;Extreme Programming&quot; was a big thing in the mid-90s and that featured test frameworks as a core component. Automated testing isn&#x27;t new. There are plenty of old books that advocate exactly the &quot;new and trendy&quot; processes you decry. If your argument is &quot;Write code like engineers did 20+ years ago!&quot;, then that includes automated testing.<p>I strongly suspect that we&#x27;re not actually that far apart in our thinking. I don&#x27;t believe that unit tests magically make your code better. You can&#x27;t develop a solution to a problem you don&#x27;t fully understand by throwing more and more tests at it. Developers still need to take the time to think. I believe a lot of my enthusiasm for testing comes from the belief (...experience...) that there are plenty of developers out there who, as you put it it, are coders rather than engineers. My tests pick up <i>their</i> mistakes (and mine, because sometimes I&#x27;m not at my best). Maybe, if you&#x27;re <i>very</i> fortunate, you&#x27;ve managed to surround yourself with a team who are all really good engineers who genuinely don&#x27;t need to test things because they&#x27;re rigorous to the point of infallibility. I haven&#x27;t, and I work in an industry that means I probably never will, so tests <i>are</i> necessary.<p>Advocating testing is much, much more productive, and will lead to better software in the long run, than advocating developers write better code.