_why suggested that …chaos is an essential component of writing code. The system is too big for you to fathom. So you are always finding yourself in unfamiliar territory. And once you fathom the system, it becomes too boring and tedious to pay attention to details… …Unit testing, in particular, is designed to reel in spontaneous hacking. It is like framing a picture before it has been painted. Hacking, at heart, will continue to be something of spontaneous order, something of anarchy, and the landscape of hacking is something which comes from human action but is not of human design.

Yesterday’s flow chart was designed to help with the complex issue of determining if a particular piece of code is testable. Today’s flow chart helps with the equally complex problem of determining when to write, or run, your tests. Like the last one it is distributed under the WTFPL license so please feel free to use wherever and however you want.

Defensive Programming 101 For any given programmer the following statement should always be treated as truth: My code sucks, but your code sucks more - Dave Astels [deleted post] Good version control habits and test coverage will get you out of most jams related to your own code but we rarely write apps that are comprised of just our code. There are almost always libraries from other people code that you’ll include to save yourself from having to re-invent the wheel.

I think I understand why people tend to not write tests. Because they believe that tests aren’t something that’s either needed or important. “Duh,” I hear you say, but bear with me. Why don’t people believe that tests are something that’s either needed or important? Well, I think one of the biggest contributing factors to WHY is that essentially zero of the learn to program in language FOO books ever mention unit testing.