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>If your goal includes long-term maintainability then should refactor for simplicity and consistency. Removing unneeded code and unneeded tests is a good thing.

I agree with this in principle, but I think people disagree about what is needed. One person might look at a good set of tests and think it's a waste of time, but if it actually hits the right points then it's probably worth keeping. I think if unit tests are feasible and can hit a bunch of cases that would be hard to recreate otherwise, then unit tests are far superior.

>"Design the structure of your [unit] tests to be contra-variant with the structure of your production code. ... The structure of your tests should not be a mirror of the structure of your code."

That's a nice ideal. But as with the refactoring issue, it may be impossible to test a thing without recreating some of that structure. That's why we have mocks.




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