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I agree. Everyone should consider the costs and benefits of testing to arrive at a system that works for them.

Early on in a system design, I prefer going overboard with integration tests.

The architecture is hard to predict early on, so I don't want to get paralyzed on figuring it out. Just get the tests passing without overthinking.

Once I find a better way to do things, I can rip apart and restructure the internals with the safety net of end to end tests.

I rarely write unit tests at this stage because the effort of writing and rewriting them adds friction to getting the software working and restructuring the code.

If every time I redraw a boundary, I need to rewrite a bunch of unit tests, I'll be less likely to improve the code quality.



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