Fediverse

I love writing tests, It's all the shit that comes after that that sucks.

Those first few pushes that all come up green feel like magic. That first red that points out something you missed, you go back and make a quick change and it's now green and it's the best thing you've ever seen.

It's sooner or later, you throw a couple big red bois on a production build that don't make any sense. You start digging through the code of some guy that only writes comments in haiku and has the impression he gets paid by the number of layers deep he can nest a ternary.

Sooner or later you figure out it's just an edge case there's nothing actually wrong. You'll need to refactor one of the systems but you still have production to push to fix a critical bug, so you hotwire the test and write it off as P1 tech debt.

Eventually, you end up with unit tests that aren't P1 and they fail. If you're understaffed, or overscoped, sooner or later you just have a bunch of half-assed zombie test sitting around. Unless you can convince production to let you go back and clear up your tech debt it's just a unit test graveyard. It still has the big bumpers in place so something serious can't fail. But you never seem to be able to get back to make everything bright new and shiny again.

I wish more developers would do QA. After working with QA my code improved so much because I was proactively thinking about how things might break or potential issues that I never would have thought of.

Personally I dislike writing useless tests. I use test as a development tool (it's easier to implement some DB operations for example by writing tests than performing some actions manually) and to test logic that can actually fail because of changes in other part of the code withouts me noticing. Testing thinks like "button calls click() method when clicked" is IMHO pointless. If someone can change this code and push to prod without testings manually or doing code review they can also disable the test without anyone noticing.