this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2023
43 points (100.0% liked)

Experienced Devs

4008 readers
13 users here now

A community for discussion amongst professional software developers.

Posts should be relevant to those well into their careers.

For those looking to break into the industry, are hustling for their first job, or have just started their career and are looking for advice, check out:

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
snowe
jmk1ng
drewsiferr
43
How do you get your team to write tests? (self.experienced_devs)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by kersplort to c/experienced_devs
29 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

I'm like a test unitarian. Unit tests? Great. Integration tests? Awesome. End to end tests? If you're into that kind of thing, go for it. Coverage of lines of code doesn't matter. Coverage of critical business functions does. I think TDD can be a cult, but writing software that way for a little bit is a good training exercise.

I'm a senior engineer at a small startup. We need to move fast, ship new stuff fast, and get things moving. We've got CICD running mocked unit tests, integration tests, and end to end tests, with patterns and tooling for each.

I have support from the CTO in getting more testing in, and I'm able to use testing to cover bugs and regressions, and there's solid testing on a few critical user path features. However, I get resistance from the team on getting enough testing to prevent regressions going forward.

The resistance is usually along lines like:

  • You shouldn't have to refactor to test something
  • We shouldn't use mocks, only integration testing works.
    • Repeat for test types N and M
  • We can't test yet, we're going to make changes soon.

How can I convince the team that the tools available to them will help, and will improve their productivity and cut down time having to firefight?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] kersplort 6 points 1 year ago

"It takes years" seems like the most reasonable alternative to forcing my coworkers to TDD or not merge code.

I think that getting people into the benefits of testing is something that's really worthwhile. Building out some of these test suites - especially the end to end tests- were some really eye opening experiences that gave me a lot of insight into the product. "Submit a test with your bugfix" is another good practice - getting the error the first time prevents a regression from creeping in.