Is the popularity of unit tests waning?

Before getting into my concerns about whether unit testing's popularity has peaked, let me state that I think unit testing is the most important benefit wrought by the agile revolution. I agree that you can write perfectly good programs without unit tests (we did put man on the moon in 1969, after all), but for most programs of any size, you're likely to be far better off using unit tests than not.

The problem is that only a small subset of developers understand that. And recent data points suggests that the number of programmers who use unit tests is not exactly growing quickly. I'll list some of the data points below that I've been developing for my column in SD Times.

1) Commercial products on the wane. Agitar was a company whose entire fate was tied to the popularity of unit testing. Despite very good products, a free service to auto-generate unit tests for your code, and some terrific exponents (especially Alberto Savoia and Jeff Frederick) to tell their story, the company closed a down a few weeks ago, essentially having come to the conclusion that it could never be sold at a price that could repay investors. So rather than ask for more funding, it closed down. If unit testing were gaining popularity robustly, Agitar surely would have come to a different conclusion.

2) Few OSS products. Except for the xUnit frameworks themselves, few FOSS tools for unit testing have been adopted. The innovative Jester project, which built a tool that looked for untested or poorly tested logic, essentially stopped development a long time ago because to quote the founder, Ivan Moore, in a comment to me "so few sites are into unit testing enough to care about perfecting their tests."

3) Major Java instructors aren't teaching it. Consider this interview with Cay Horstmann, co-author of the excellent Core Java books. (He asks, "If so many experienced developers don't write unit tests, what does that say?" In speculating on an answer, he implies that good developers don't need unit tests. Ugh!)

4) Unit testing books are few and far between. I am seeing about one new one a year. And as yet, not a single book on JUnit 4, which has been out for nearly three years(!).

5) Alternative unit-testing frameworks, such as the excellent TestNG, are essentially completely invisible. I was at a session on scripting this spring at SD West and in a class of 30 or so, two people had heard of TestNG (the teacher and I).

I could speculate on causes, but I have no clear culprit to point to. Certainly, unit testing needs to be evangelized more. And evangelized correctly. The folks who insist on 100% code coverage are making a useful tool unpalatable to serious programmers (as discussed here by Howard Lewis Ship, the inventor of Tapestry). But, I think the cause has to be something deeper than this. I would love to hear thoughts from readers in real-world situations where unit testing has been abandoned, cut back, or simply rejected--and why.

It would be a shame to have unit testing disappear and its current users viewed as aging, pining developers hankering for a technology the world has largely passed by. That would return programmers to the tried-and-true practice of glassy-eyed staring at a debugger for hours--something I have not missed at all.