Elizabeth Hendrickson on "Better testing, worse testing"

I've always enjoyed Elisabeth Hendrickson's articles and blog posts on testing. Her latest post, "Better Testing, Worse Testing", confirms one of the two main conclusions Titus and I reached while working on our PyCon Agile Testing tutorial. Here's an excerpt from the Wrap-up section of our tutorial handout notes:

Wrap up & Conclusions

1. Holistic testing is the way to go. No one test type does it all...
   • unit testing of basic code
   • Functional/acceptance testing of business/user logic
   • regression testing
   
   

That's pretty much what Elisabeth says in her post, with war stories that prove her point. I particularly liked the following "lesson learned" -- and I quote: "This leads me to my next general conclusion: an isolated improvement in one aspect of a development process tends to be offset by declines in another, resulting in no overall improvement in the final result. So how do we improve results? By paying attention to the whole process and not just isolated aspects of it."

Again, holistic testing.

What was our second main conclusion for the tutorial? Continous integration! Here's another excerpt from the handout notes, the second bullet point under Wrap-up and Conclusions:

Make it as easy as humanly possible to run all these types of tests automatically, or they will not get run.