Experienced Devs

3978 readers

1 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:

Logo base by Delapouite under CC BY 3.0 with modifications to add a gradient

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

How do you get your team to write tests? (programming.dev)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

27 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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

One aspect that does work is framing the need for tests as assurance that specific invariants are verified and preserved

Agreed - this is the specific aspect which I hoped would be communicated by studying TDD a bit!

The team is afraid that making changes will be more difficult when tests exist, but TDD (or maybe a more specific concept like you mentioned) demonstrates that tests make future changes easier.

And I specifically advocated not to follow “write tests first”.

Name-dropping concepts actually contributes to loose credibility of any code quality effort, and works against you.

OK. If I were having an in-depth discussion with my team of fellow developers to convince them to start writing tests, I don’t think that’s name-dropping.