Unit Testing SharePoint - Past, Present, and Sporm

As I described in SharePoint: The Wild West of Software Development there is a serious problem when you develop for SharePoint: ensuring quality through unit testing is really, really hard. And that's where a new open source tool just released today called sporm (SharePoint Object Relational Mapper) comes in. While sporm provides many benefits besides simplified unit testing I wanted to focus on this topic first, because sporm's approach, which models the entity framework in the way it supports POCO's, is a unique feature not available with other SharePoint tools like LINQ to SharePoint.