"A colleague of mine told me a story that exemplifies the common attitude of non-technical personnel toward unit testing. He had done a presentation on test-driven development (TDD) for a new team he joined. Afterwards, the project manager gathered all the other developers in a separate room and told them flat out: "We do not have time to write unit tests, so just disregard everything he said."
"Unfortunately, all too often this is the short-sighted attitude that developers face. From my own experience, every project where unit testing was not a priority has usually ended in delays and missed deadlines. Worst of all, every single major change to the system (which is inevitable) would bring up the spectre of breaking some existing functionality. Sooner or later, this would blow up during manual testing and send the whole team into a chaotic frenzy of last-minute patches, which led to an even more unstable system down the road.
"Implementing TDD from the Start
"Many believe TDD is expensive, but that is true only if your system was designed without any regard for either unit testing or the system's long-term maintenance costs. On a recent project, my team took those two issues into account right from the beginning by ensuring that all of our functionality was easily testable and by choosing the right tools (Maven and Jetty) to facilitate TDD for server-side applications."
