Tests? They’re for people who can’t write code!

This section discusses another obvious possibility when it comes to automated testing – simply not writing automated tests at all. Perhaps not even testing at all. Is this viable?

Not testing at all is a choice we could make, and this might not be as silly as it sounds. If we define testing as verifying some outcome is achieved in its target environment, then things such as deep-space probes cannot truly be tested on Earth. At best, we are simulating the target environment during our testing. Giant-scale web applications can rarely be tested with realistic load profiles. Take any large web application, launch a hundred million users at it – all doing invalid things – and see how most applications hold up. It’s probably not as well as developer testing suggested.

There are areas of development where we might expect to see fewer automated tests:

• Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) scripts...