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I agree, but with a caveat - there's an important time/value tradeoff to going down any particular rabbit hole where you have more tasks than time to expend on
by rincebrain 11y ago
I agree, but with a caveat - there's an important time/value tradeoff to going down any particular rabbit hole where you have more tasks than time to expend on them, particularly if you're in a billable or result-oriented area, and it lacks obvious benefit.
There are plenty of times I've seen people think of things as "well, it just does X" because of a lack of depth of knowledge, but you also can't necessarily go down every rabbit hole to the bottom, unfortunately.
- draw_down 11y agoI disagree because things like flappy tests are a "smell" that could lead to discovering a deeper problem. We simply don't know ahead of time that the payoff won't be worth the effort in such a situation. If you can't explain what's wrong, that's bad.
- rincebrain 11y agoCertainly, but given that the value of the test can be nonzero even if unreliable, and you may not have time to run down why it's unreliable, it makes sense to have a mechanism to utilize it. Not ever having engineering time to investigate why it's unreliable is a (mostly) unrelated problem.