Matthew Carlson’s blog post “Fighting Distraction With Unit Tests” inspired me to share some extra benefits of writing test code I’ve discovered during my PhD program. I’m working on a weird project that’s constantly changing as I try new things, and naturally, debugging and ensuring correctness was a nightmare. So I started writing tests, cursing myself for needing to write so much code I’ll likely throw away soon. But as it turns out, testing can be pretty helpful in a few other ways: