automated unit test generation

[skunkwerk]

Hi, 
   I've been working on an open source project to auto-generate unit tests for web apps based on traces collected from the web server and static code analysis.  I've got an alpha version online at www.splintera.com, and the source is at https://github.com/splintera/python-django-client.  I'd love to get some feedback from the community and extend it to work with other languages as well.

  I wrote it originally because I was sick of coming into companies where I had to inherit tens of thousands of lines of code without any tests, and never had time to write them manually - being careful to mock out dependencies, specify the correct inputs and outputs, and figure out which path it was taking through the code. 

   I'd like to get some sense of: 
- how difficult/tedious is writing unit tests, and why? 
- do you wish you had better code coverage? 
- how important is testing to you? 

thanks, 
imran 

[Derek]

Imran

Sounds very useful (I am now in that position of having to generate tests for an existing code base).  Can this be run as a stand-alone tool?  I ask because your website says "we continue to collect data on real-world usage through low overhead sampling on your production servers"; but that will not be possible as we are running behind a firewall.

Thanks
Derek

PS Maybe on your site you need to quote Jacob: 'Code without tests is broken as designed'.