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There are enough people in the industry who are actually paid for writing the tests and discovering the potential failures of the mission critical code, where t
by acqq 10y ago
There are enough people in the industry who are actually paid for writing the tests and discovering the potential failures of the mission critical code, where the tests are fundamentally important.
I've had a small team nicely paid for months only to prove and document the that the product my company was to deliver won't fail in some specific scenarios, specified by the contract.
Those who don't produce the mission critical code (or believe what they produce is not on the critical path) unsurprisingly see the investment in the tests questionable. Of course, there is always a real danger of doing something "just because it is done" even if there's no real need.
- keithnz 10y agoI think possibly you are not quite understanding what Kent meant. Those people you mention are not getting paid for tests, they are being paid to give confidence that some software system works, they use tests to do this, just like Kent does. His point is about delivering working code with a certain level of confidence. Meaning if tests don't increase your confidence, but simply put in to tick a box for having a test, you aren't getting paid for that (or if you are getting paid for that, someones lost sight of what they are trying to achieve)
- acqq 10y agoIn my specific case, that I've mentioned, the tests surely increased the confidence as they were the part of the whole process, where the results from the tests were used to modify the product in question until it was able to pass all the tests. The tests allowed to proactively "solve the bugs" which would otherwise produce much more problems if the product had been used in production without these tests.