Why Most Unit Testing is Waste

http://www.rbcs-us.com/documents/Why-Most-Unit-Testing-is-Waste.pdf

Summary:
Keep regression tests around for up to a year — but most of those will be system-level tests rather than unit tests.
• Keep unit tests that test key algorithms for which there is a broad, formal, independent oracle of correctness, and for which there is ascribable business value.
• Except for the preceding case, if X has business value and you can text X with either a system test or a unit test, use a system test — context is everything.
• Design a test with more care than you design the code.
• Turn most unit tests into assertions.
• Throw away tests that haven’t failed in a year.
• Testing can’t replace good development: a high test failure rate suggests you should shorten development intervals, perhaps radically, and make sure your architecture and design regimens have teeth
• If you find that individual functions being tested are trivial, double-check the way you incentivize developers’ performance. Rewarding coverage or other meaningless metrics can lead to rapid architecture decay.
• Be humble about what tests can achieve. Tests don’t improve quality: developers do.