In my commute this morning I was listening to my weekly dose of DotNetRocks - Show 214 with guest Billy Hollis and Billy mentioned something on Agile to illustrate a point, and it has stuck with me all day.

He was referring to a presentation he attended where an advocate said he was writing 2 or 3 lines of unit test code for each line of production code.  Billy's objection to this is hardly a challenge to intuition: Are we getting 4x the value for 4x the code?

One of my metrics for the unit tests that I write is that they don't hurt.  Some can be a couple of lines long, some can be heavily copied-n-paste'd.  Customizing a CodeRush template is time well spent.  There are no wrong answers, however you get them in there is really OK.

It makes sense:  You're writing a unit test.  The aim is to isolate a gizmo of your choosing in your code and exercise it.  The cumulative weight of the unit tests should really function as an expression of your intent for the gizmo.  I outlined what I think of the high importance of naming your tests in a prior post.