I grant you that I should test it, and I never said otherwise. If I'm attacking a strawman, it's the same one that was just put in front of me as a misinterpretation of my argument. What I contest and addressed was a test for the sole purpose of determining if my class, assumed to be non-abstract, was instantiable or not.
Other tests being necessary for something to be good programming or not, the issue here is that a test or a manual perusal of the base class for changes (specifically, for the addition of new abstract members) is required *just* to assert that my class is or is not abstract. Yes, I should test my class, but I shouldn't have to test it just to ensure that it's the class I *intended* to create, rather than the one the compiler assumes because of a base class change.
