Another Bliki entry related post; I’m not sure I would refer to what is described in the article as Test Cancer, I would say it is Test Blight. As soon as one test is switched off it weakens all the other tests and soon the whole “test tree” is dying off as it begins to constrain and describe the system less and less.

Test Cancer is probably a better term for the situation where your test base keeps growing and growing but in a meaningless way that actually obscures what is important in terms of the system description. For example JUnit tests that have no assertions but just execute code. Or hundreds of test files that are testing the accessors of your value objects.