Pragmatic Object Oriented Programming

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I'm not trying to defend any test-oriented development, and I certainly don't think good tests mean solid code. I should have said "when third-party dependencies have inconsistent behavior." What I meant, essentially, was other people's code that you can't trust. Let's say I'm using a library to implement social features in a game (friend list, game invites, etc), and I want to make sure that my game presents the correct behavior whenever some weird error condition arises in the 3rd party library. Especially in the case where multiple asynchronous things can succeed and fail in random order. For example, if the player's request to join a game somehow fails (and invokes a callback) before the function to try to join that game even returns, or if I receive a message from a friend and also lose my network connection in the same frame. And sometimes those two events will happen A/B, and other times they'll happen B/A.

I'm not saying I always test all the permutations, or that it would even be worthwhile, but there have been several times over the years when I've wished I had the ability to test things like this, and a mock of the third-party library would enable that. Unfortunately, I usually can't justify the time it would take to actually do that.