Testing Philosophy — What to Test and What Not To
Understand the testing pyramid, the ROI of different test types, and how to avoid testing theater.
12 min readtesting, philosophy, testing-pyramid, web-dev
Most testing advice falls into two camps: "test everything" or "tests are a waste of time." Both are wrong. The developers who ship reliable software know something simpler: test the things that matter, skip the things that don't, and always ask whether a test is worth more than the time it takes to write and maintain.
This lesson isn't about tools or syntax. It's about judgment — the skill of deciding what deserves a test.
The Testing Pyramid
The testing pyramid describes the ideal distribution of test types:
/ E2E \ Few, expensive, slow
/----------\
/ Integration \ Some, moderate cost
/----------------\
/ Unit Tests \ Many, cheap, fast
/____________________\- Unit tests test individual functions or comp
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