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Possibly stupid question: is automated testing actually a common practice? (self.ask_experienced_devs)

submitted 6 months ago by yournameplease to c/ask_experienced_devs

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Referring more to smaller places like my own - few hundred employees with ~20 person IT team (~10 developers).

I read enough about testing that it seems industry standard. But whenever I talk to coworkers and my EM, it's generally, "That would be nice, but it's not practical for our size and the business would allow us to slow down for that." We have ~5 manual testers, so things aren't considered "untested", but issues still frequently slip through. It's insurance software so at least bugs aren't killing people, but our quality still freaks me out a bit.

I try to write automated tests for my own code, since it seems valuable, but I avoid it whenever it's not straightforward. I've read books on testing, but they generally feel like either toy examples or far more effort than my company would be willing to spend. Over time I'm wondering if I'm just overly idealistic, and automated testing is more of a FAANG / bigger company thing.

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[–] yournameplease 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Was there any event that prompted more investment into testing? I feel like something catastrophic would need to happen before anyone would consider serious testing investment. In the past (before I joined) there were apparently people who tried to get Selenium suites but nothing ever stuck.

I think nobody sees value in improving something that is more or less "good enough" for so long. In our legacy software, most major development is copy+paste and change things, which I guess reduces the chance of regressions (at the cost of making big changes much, much slower). I think we have close to 100 4k line java files copied from the same original, plus another 20-30 scripts and configs for each...

We are doing a "microservices rewrite" that interfaces with the legacy app (which feels like a death march project by now), and I think it inherited much of the testing difficulties of the old system, in part due to my inexperience when we started. Less code duplication, but now lots of enormous JSONs being thrown all over the network.

I agree that manual testing is not enough, but I can't seem to get much agreement. I think I do get value when I write unit tests, but I feel like I can't point to concrete value because there's not an obvious metric I'm gaining. I like that when I test code, I know that nobody will revert or break that area (unless they remove the tests, I suppose), but our coverage is low enough that I don't trust them to mean the system actually works.

[–] BehindTheBarrier 6 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

Our main motivator was, and is, that manual testing is very time consuming and uninteresting for devs. Spending upwards of a week before a release because the teams has to setup, pick and perform all featue tests again on the release candidate, is both time and money. And we saw things slip through now and then.

Our application is time critical, legacy code of about 30 years, spread between C# and database code, running in different variations with different requirements. So a single page may show differently depending on where it's running. Changing one thing can often affect others, so for us it is sometimes very tiresome to verify even the smalles changes since they may affect different variants. Since there is no automated tests, especially for GUI (which we also do not unit test much, because that is complicated and prone to breaking), we have to not only test changes, but often check for regression by comparing by hand to the old version.

We have a complicated system with a few intergrations, setting up all test scenarios not only takes time during testing, but also time for the dev to prepare the instructions for. And I mentioned calculations, going through all motions to verify that a calculated result is the same between two version is a awfully boring experience when that is exaclty something automated tests can just completely take over for you.

As our application is projected to grow, so does all of this manual testing required for a single change. So putting all that effort into manual testing and preparation can intsead often just be put on making tests that check requirements. And once our coverage is good enough, we can only manuall test interfaces, and leave a lot of the complicated edge cases and calculcation tests to automated tests. It's a bit idealistic to say automated tests can do everything, but they can certainly remove the most boring parts.

[–] yournameplease 1 points 6 months ago

I guess since we have manual QAs, there's less motivation to get away from manual testing as it's literally their job description. Not to say we aren't wasting time and money still. I do find other devs and I still need to spend a lot of time ourselves manually sanity checking things.

That all does sound like my dream end goal, though, thanks for the responses.