---
title: "Tough Questions about unit testing - Your comments required"
url: "https://osherove.com/blog/2008/5/18/tough-questions-about-unit-testing-your-comments-required.md"
canonical: "https://osherove.com/blog/2008/5/18/tough-questions-about-unit-testing-your-comments-required.html"
published: "2008-05-18T10:30:00"
updated: "2008-05-18T10:30:00"
tags: ["Agile", "Agile Related", "Art Of Unit Testing"]
author: "Roy Osherove"
description: "As part of My Book I have a chapter on the challenges of integrating unit testing practices into an organization. One of the sections deals with \"Tough questions and answers\". In short, what are the tough questions you…"
usage: "Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page)."
license: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
---

# Tough Questions about unit testing - Your comments required

By Roy Osherove May 18, 2008 In [Agile](https://osherove.com/blog/category/agile), [Agile Related](https://osherove.com/blog/category/agile-related), [Art Of Unit Testing](https://osherove.com/blog/category/art-of-unit-testing)

**Historical article** · Originally published May 18, 2008; technical details may be outdated.

As part of [My Book](http://the.artofunittesting.com/) I have a chapter on the challenges of integrating unit testing practices into an organization. One of the sections deals with "Tough questions and answers". In short, what are the tough questions you will have to deal with when introducing unit testing.

here are the questions I've come across but I'd love to see if there are some that I am missing. Also, I am looking for great answers and references as responses to these questions. Your comments are appreciated:

- 1 How much time will this add to the current process?
- 2 Will my QA job be at risk because of this?
- 3 How do we know this is actually working?
- 4 How much time will this add to the current process?
- 5 Is there proof that unit testing helps?

\- any other tough questions?

\- Got good answers?

**Comments:**

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## More in Agile

[All posts in Agile](https://osherove.com/blog/category/agile)

- May 31, 2008

    ### [Unit testing vs. Integration Testing : The Restaurant Analogy](https://osherove.com/blog/2008/5/31/unit-testing-vs-integration-testing-the-restaurant-analogy.html)

- May 19, 2008

    ### [Two Faced Commits - how the ALT.NET Community is becoming more and more dogmatic](https://osherove.com/blog/2008/5/19/two-faced-commits-how-the-altnet-community-is-becoming-more.html)

- May 17, 2008

    ### ["Swapping" instead of "Injecting" calls between classes](https://osherove.com/blog/2008/5/17/quotswappingquot-instead-of-quotinjectingquot-calls-between.html)

- May 15, 2008

    ### [Typemock Isolator 4.2.4 is out](https://osherove.com/blog/2008/5/15/typemock-isolator-424-is-out.html)


---

## About the author

**Roy Osherove**: Senior Solutions Architect at AWS working on AI for production and AI-driven development; author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership, with about 20 years of consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery.

### Sites

- [RobotPaper](https://robotpaper.ai/): This blog: AI patterns and anti-patterns, AI and coding agents, and engineering leadership.
- [osherove.com](https://osherove.com): Roy's personal site. Author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership; consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery, plus about 20 years of blog posts.
- [The Art of Unit Testing](https://www.artofunittesting.com): The Art of Unit Testing, 3rd Edition (Manning): readable, maintainable, trustworthy unit tests, plus TDD workshops in C#, JavaScript, Java and Kotlin.
- [5whys.com](https://www.5whys.com): Roy's writing on software team leadership: self-organizing teams, surviving chaos, learning mode and the Elastic Leadership model.
- [Pipeline Driven](https://pipelinedriven.org): Continuous delivery and DevOps practices: build patterns, pipeline-friendly testing, DevOps metrics and enterprise DevOps.
- [Elastic Leadership](https://www.elasticleadership.com): Elastic Leadership, Roy's framework for software team leaders (survival, learning and self-organizing modes).

### Social

- X: https://x.com/royosherove
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/osherove/

### Contact

- Contact form: https://forms.gle/jQSx5KoXvrVA1JCK7

### License

Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page). License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/