So, as weird as this may seem, I'm currently in the process of adding tests to a project I'm building at work. Why weird? Because I've never done this before in 25 years as a professional developer.

Some of the code was pretty straightforward to write tests for, but as I progressed it became obvious that refactoring would be needed in order to be able to write tests in some areas. Before this refactoring, the code was succinct, easy to read and had (to my mind) just the right amount of abstraction. The changes necessary to make it 'testable' however, seem to make it overly complex and less efficient just for this 'benefit' of having tests. It just feels... wrong.

Surely the primary function of the code should be that it does the job it's designed to do - ideally as efficiently and (from the developer's point of view) understandably as possible. Going through the contortions and extra layers of abstraction necessary to make it testable seems to fly in the face of these goals.

Does anyone else feel this way? Is this an issue with all languages? Is there a better way of doing things?

Discuss.