Unit testing: because all of the cool kids are doing it

While it’s fun to dump on the faddishness in software development, the rise of unit testing represents real progress in the state-of-the-practice. As an example, in the Django framework where I spend most of my time, I appreciate how much the framework helps me begin writing and running unit tests.

Thanks go to the test-driven development movement for making testing cool and inspiring an ecosystem of automated unit testing tools, even if it turns out that TDD itself provides no measurable benefits (the evidence to date is mixed).