CodingEvents

Project maintained by HealthyGamer Hosted on GitHub Pages — Theme by mattgraham

Why Testing Is Important

Boring and tedious to write
Time-consuming and expensive
- (estimates anywhere from 15%-50% of total dev costs)
Not a user-facing feature
Difficult to define what “enough” tests looks like
If there’s a QA team, it can make devs defensive
Bugs will still happen

Bugs have consequences, and sometimes, they even cause people to get hurt
Issues erode user trust in the software
- If you don’t currently have competitors, that can change quickly
Bug fixes take longer than testing and mess up timelines since it is unplanned work. It’s ultimately more expensive.
Tests help enforce code quality standards.

Create a plan
- What types of tests to focus on: unit, system, integration, end-to-end, acceptance, and performance
  - Adding tests to an existing system usually rules out unit tests initially
Create a strategy for implementation.
- New dev first
- Riskiest code first
- Tests as part of bug fixes
Decide on metrics for success
- Code coverage is a problematic metric.
- The number of bugs is more valuable, but it takes time to measure
- There are plenty of others, but they can be harder to measure: https://www.practitest.com/resource-center/blog/test-coverage-metrics/
Find evidence for why testing is valuable
- https://web.archive.org/web/20091026154339/http://biblio.gdinwiddie.com/biblio/StudiesOfTestDrivenDevelopment These are for TDD specifically, but the principles apply elsewhere.
- https://www.it-cisq.org/the-cost-of-poor-software-quality-in-the-us-a-2020-report/ “This report seeks to quantify the impact of poor software quality on the United States economy referencing publicly available source material. For 2020, we estimate that figure to be approximately $2.08 trillion.”
- https://www.nist.gov/system/files/documents/director/planning/report02-3.pdf 4.9 hours to fix a bug in dev, 15.3 hours after release.
Better code quality, better work/life balance
- Fewer nights and weekend emergencies
- Improvements in code quality make it easier to do the job