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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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[–] hollyberries 3 points 6 months ago (2 children)

I’m sure you could end up writing a test that’s bad in just the right way to end up doing more harm than good, but I do think that’s the exception(heh).

That's exactly why I've asked. That is where I've gone wrong with TDD in the past, especially where any sort of math is involved due to being absolutely horrible at it (and I do game dev these days!). I can problem solve and write the code, I just can't manually proof the math without external help and have spent countless hours looking for where my issue was due to being 100% certain that the formula or algorithm was correct >.<

Nowadays anytime numbers are involved I write the tests after doing manual tests multiple times and getting the expected response, and/or having an LLM check the work and make suggestions. That in itself introduces more issues sometimes since that can also be wrong. Probably should have paid attention in school all those years ago lol

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

Aw man, I can empathise. I don't personally have any issues with mathsy stuff but I can imagine it being a huge brick wall at times, especially in game dev. I wish I had advice for that but its not a problem I've had to solve!

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

Game dev seems like a place where testing is a bit less common due to need for fast iterations and prototyping, not to say it isn't valuable.

I've seen a good talk (I think GDC?) on how the Talos Principle devs developed a tool to replay inputs for acceptance testing. I can't seem to find the talk, but here is a demo of the tool.

The Factorio devs also have some testing discussions in their blog somewhere.

[–] hollyberries 1 points 5 months ago

The Talos Principle video was interesting to watch, thanks for the link! It shined a little bit of light on automated testing.

Theres also someone on YouTube who has been teaching an AI on how to walk and solve puzzles on its own, the channel name escapes me and I'm nowhere near a working computer to look it up at the moment :(