My preferred approach in many projects is to do some unit testing, but not a ton, early on in the project and wait until the core APIs and concepts of a module have crystallized.
At that point I then test the API exhaustively with integrations tests.
In my experience, these integration tests are much more useful than unit tests, because they remain stable and useful even as you change the implementation around. They aren’t as tied to the current codebase, but rather express higher level invariants that survive refactors much more readily.
Recent articles
- Useful patterns for building HTML tools - 10th December 2025
- Under the hood of Canada Spends with Brendan Samek - 9th December 2025
- Highlights from my appearance on the Data Renegades podcast with CL Kao and Dori Wilson - 26th November 2025