Michael Feathers on Unit Testing Rules

Short but high-impact post from Michael Feathers (of "Working Effectively with Legacy Code" fame). His main recommendation is to have unit tests that do not interact with the OS or other applications. Interactions to avoid include databases, sockets, even file systems. When you have a set of unit tests that run in isolation (and thus run very quickly), and when you have other sets of tests that do exercise all the interactions above, you are in a good position to quickly pinpoint who the culprit is when a test fails.