My friend (and former boss and business partner) Micah found this gem of a quote from Donald Knuth addressing code proofs.

Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.

Micah writes more on the topic and reminds me of why I enjoyed working with him so much. He’s always been quite thoughtful in his approach to problems. And I’m not just saying that because he agrees with me. ;)

On another note, several commenters pointed out that one thing I didn’t mention before, but should have, is that verifying the quality of code is only one small aspect of unit testing and Test Driven Development.

The more important factor is that TDD is a design process. Employing TDD is one (not the only one, but I think it is a good one) approach for improving the design of code and especially the usability of your code. By usability, I mean from another developer’s perspective.

If I have to create twenty different objects in order to call a method on your class, your class is probably not very usable to other developers. TDD is one approach that forces you to find that out sooner, rather than later.

A code proof won’t necessarily find that “flaw” because it is not a flaw in logic.