Keep your Source Close and your Unit Tests Closer

Question

When I first started using unit tests I encountered two problems. First was being able to test private methods and fields and second falling behind on keeping unit tests up

Answer 1

You shouldn't test private methods separately, because they are (should be!) used from public methods or possibly constructors - so the public methods depends on the private ones to succeed with their assignments.

These public methods/constructors will (should!) fail if the private methods don't do their work. So your approach is actually a bad approach for writing unit tests.

And to iterate the previous answers - write your unit tests before you write your methods.