Always address failing unit tests

I cannot stress enough the value of unit tests. Whether adding new features or refactoring existing code, you want some validation that you haven't broken existing functionality. Unit tests are usually the fastest way to accomplish this.

This is why it annoys me when unit tests are left in a failing state. In some cases, the tests are invalid and need to be removed. In other cases, they need to be updated to match code changes. Regardless of why a test now fails, it needs to be corrected.

On a project I'm currently involved in, there was a significant rework of data access code. As you can imagine, this introduced a number of bugs, many of which were caught by now-failing unit tests. This is a good thing - that's what the unit tests are for. The problem is that the 50 newly-failing unit tests are mixed in with the 40 already-failing unit tests. We need the new failures fixed quickly, but sorting these from the "junk" unit tests will take time.