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  • Thank you, this gives me confidence in my intuitions around my question. It's come to the forefront of my attention becuase of a company wide CI pipeline that enforces 80 pct unit test coverage. 80 pct is hard to hit without lots of call verification style tests where a lot of the work is integrating (orchestrating) pre existing services. Commented Dec 31, 2022 at 8:56
  • Further, regarding the absoluteness of Robert C. Martin, this quote shows it is not accidental. From The Clean Coder - "How much of the code should be tested with these automated unit tests? Do I really need to answer that question? All of it! All. Of. It. Am I suggesting 100% test coverage? No, I’m not suggesting it. I’m demanding it. Every single line of code that you write should be tested. Period.". I feel we need to either find pragmatic ways of realising this ideal or say that RM's assertions around code coverage are no longer valid in modern software, rather than just misinterpreted. Commented Dec 31, 2022 at 10:32
  • @gbro3n 80% unit test coverage is typically quite reasonable, but not for that kind of orchestration code where you are generally interested in ensuring that some external action is triggered, not that certain functions are called. The only upside is that such code usually isn't very “branch-y”, so the function can usually be covered with a single test case. That Uncle Bob quote is worse than I would have imagined. I tend to recommend that people avoid his writing (talks, books, blogs), except for a few influential articles from his Object Mentor phase (e.g. SOLID principles). Commented Jan 1, 2023 at 16:25