Back in 2002, the company I worked for had a valuable client with a terrible problem: seems the developer of their POS (point of sale, or "cash register") system sent them a bill for their license: five year's worth. The company disputed the bill and the developer informed them that their POS system would be remotely disabled in 23 days. So our client contacted us and the owner informed a colleague and myself that we had just over three weeks to develop a POS for the client. Never mind that neither of us had any experience with swiped credit cards, or bar code readers, or cash registers, or, or, or ...

This is the story of how I learned to loathe unit tests.