# Unit Testing Points of View: A Collaborative Book on Unit-Testing Styles and Trade-offs

DevFeed: [Unit Testing Points of View: A Collaborative Book on Unit-Testing Styles and Trade-offs](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/unit-testing-points-of-view-probably-31917.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<http://blog.jayfields.com/2015/04/unit-testing-points-of-view-probably.html>)

Author: Jay (noreply@blogger.com)

Published: 2015-04-06T17:20:00Z

Content type: opinion

Language: en

Sources: [Jay Fields](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/jay-fields.md>)

Topics: [Testing](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/testing.md>), [Unit testing](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/unit-testing.md>), [Test-driven development](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/tdd.md>), [Software Engineering](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/software-engineering.md>)

Tags: [book](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/book.md>), [books](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/books.md>), [tdd](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/tdd.md>), [testing](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/testing.md>), [unit-testing](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/unit-testing.md>), [unit-tests](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/unit-tests.md>)

## AI overview

The article announces a collaborative book by Michael Feathers, Brian Marick, and the author about unit-testing styles. It aims to document the reasoning and trade-offs behind different approaches by evolving tests for a shared domain model.

## Source excerpt

Michael Feathers, Brian Marick, and I are collaborating to create a new book: Unit Testing Points of View ... probably. Origin In 2014 Martin Fowler provided Technical Review for Working Effectively with Unit Tests. As part of his feedback he said something along the lines of: I'm glad you wrote this book, and I'll likely write a bliki entry noting what I agree with and detailing what I would do differently. I'm still looking forward to that entry, and I think the idea is worth extending beyond Martin. Unit testing is now mainstream, has tons of entry level books, and has a great reference book. The result is a widely accepted idea that you can quickly and easily adopt; unfortunately, I've found little in the way of documenting pattern trade-offs. I believe that combination leads to a lot of waste. To help avoid some of that waste, I'd like to see more written about why you may want to choose one Unit Testing style over another. That was the inspiration and my goal for Working Effectively with Unit Tests. Growing Object-Oriented Software is another great example of a book that documents both the hows and whys of unit testing. After that, if you're looking for tradeoff guidance... good luck. Is this a problem? I think so. Without discussion of tradeoffs, experience reports, and concrete direction you end up with hours wasted on bad tests and proclamations of TDD's death. The report of TDD's death was an exaggeration, and the largest clue was the implication that TDD and Unit Testing were synonymous. To this day, Unit Testing is still largely misunderstood. What could be Working Effectively with Unit Tests starts with one set of opinionated Unit Tests and evolves to the types of Unit Tests that I find more productive. There's no reason this evolution couldn't be extended by other authors. This is the vision we have for Unit Testing Points of View. Michael, Brian, and I began by selecting a common domain model. The first few chapters will detail the hows and whys of ho