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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 1 points 6 months ago

Nah, red flag is certainly accurate in my case.

We really don't have a strong hierarchy of engineering leaders. Devs are all pretty much equal. EM is extremely hands-off, but also prefers to hire inexperienced developers to "train them up" (which seem like contradictory ideas...). So we we have a very free-for-all development process after work is assigned. And of course very few (zero?) devs really want to start doubling estimates for quality that no one seems to care strongly about.

(The saving grace here, if you can call it that, is that it's very easy to go around leadership and do whatever you want with the dev process, so long as you can do it yourself. So perhaps what I should do is add stricter code coverage checks on the services primarily worked by me as a way to protect me from myself, and maybe convince some others to join in.)