Unit testing is a really interesting and deep topic, but more importantly, it is a critical part of the clean code. Ultimately, unit tests are what determine the quality of the code. Unit tests often act as a mirror for the code—when the code is easy to test, it's clear and correctly designed, and this will be reflected in the unit tests.
The code for the unit tests is as important as production code. All principles that apply to production code also apply to unit tests. This means that they should be designed and maintained with the same effort and thoughtfulness. If we don't care about our unit tests, they will start to have problems and become defective (or problematic), and as a result of that, useless. If this happens, and they are hard to maintain, they become a liability which makes things even worse, because people will tend to ignore them or disable...
