Dreaming of new generation IDE

[Paul Rubin]

Steven D'Aprano <steven at REMOVE.THIS.cybersource.com.au> writes:
>> and recompile your codebase.  Every place in the code that called
>> 'method' now gets a compile time "undefined method" error that you can
>> examine to see if you need to update it.  This is something you can't
>> catch with unit tests because the call sites can be in distant modules.
>
> I don't understand why that won't work with unit tests. If you change the 
> name of a method, surely your unit tests will now start failing with 
> AttributeError?

Unit tests only test the code in the local module or package ("unit").
Obviously you also need other tests to exercise the interaction between
local and remote modules, but it's harder to be as thorough with those,
or write them as reflexively, in part because they're often written
by a separate group of programmers.