Have you ever heard of the Ship of Theseus?
The idea behind the Ship of Theseus is that if a nautical ship (or Starship, if that’s your thing) had all of its components replaced throughout its life, is it still the same ship?
If it is the same ship, then are the components individually important? Are they too important to replace? They’re all necessary, but is their existence in their current form important? Or, is it the actions/needs each component serves that makes it important, and not necessarily the component itself?
Put another way,
If you throw away the code from a particular component and replace it; how important was that code?
It is both supremely important and unimportant, all at the same time.
Code itself is unimportant: What is important is that it fits together to make a whole that provides value for its users, but if you can’t replace code, then it is probably the most important code you own, as you have a single point of failure.
One of the interesting aspects of Test Driven Development (particulary FauxO) is that it makes the implementing code unimportant. It takes away that single point of failure. Now, any code that passes your tests is able to both replace and be replaced.
There’s a lot of power there, power that isn’t available when you’re only writing unit tests. Because unit tests are written after your production code; they’re necessarily coupled to it, as we’ve talked about before. But if your code is able to be replaced; the power isn’t in the code any more, it’s in the whole. If a component gives you problems, replace it. You can’t do that with just unit tests. It’s sometimes not even possible to do it with Unit test + Automated E2E tests due to the number of code-paths your automated tests have to traverse.