More seriously, the point of the article, from a skim, appears to be that "writing too many unit tests is a waste of time". Well, duh. Save 15 minutes of your life and pass on this one, methinks.
In retrospect I wish I'd used a different title and skipped the first few paragraphs - I'd intended it to be a bit of humorous indirection making it sound like the post was going to be against automated testing whereas it is really very much in favour of it, but unfortunately people have taken it the wrong way.
People didn't "take it the wrong way." You did not clearly express yourself. If you want to talk about the value of functional and integration tests, then talk about that.
I'd appreciate it if anyone interested in the post would skip the first few paragraphs and start at "Benefits of automated functional tests" since that was what I was intending to convey.
Packaging really matters where blog posts are concerned... the hook needs to be crafted well for each article, or people won't bite.
I'd take scott's advice and just repost... many people will probably read it then, since the subject is relevant.
Commence downmodding in 3, 2, 1...
But back on topic. There is some research supporting unittesting (McConnell writes about it in Code Complete) it doesn't find even half of the existing bugs though, and it should be supported by other testing methods.
The main-big-very-nice advantage of unittesting is that any bug that is _does_ find is easily found and fixed.
Generally, people like having their attention taken up, provided you follow their advice. :-)
I continue to assert that most unit tests are the same type of drudge work that good programmers try to avoid in other scenarios (data entry, text editing, email templates, deploy scripts, etc).
"I think sometimes we take for granted how fortunate we are as developers to be able to make such a direct impact on problems instead of being wholly dependent on others."
If you're too lazy to write good docs, please, at least leave me some tests.