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I am curious if there is any good way to measure that amount of waste. I agree that waste from extra and useless tests exists, but I am not convinced that waste
by sqeaky 9y ago
I am curious if there is any good way to measure that amount of waste. I agree that waste from extra and useless tests exists, but I am not convinced that waste is entirely bad.
It seems to me that waste is unavoidable with teams newer to automated testing and may simply be part of the cost of using automated tests. If that is the case then it seems better to compare the cost of bugs with no automated to cost of superfluous tests. In that comparison extra tests definitely seems like the lesser of two evils, even without hard numbers. I would prefer hard numbers because my intuition could be wrong.
- thehardsphere 9y agoWell, if the organization tracks the time developers spend doing things, then it should be easy to estimate the waste. 1. Take the number of hours spent writing tests. 2. Multiply by whatever percentage of the tests are unnecessary. 3. Multiply by the labor cost per hour. Or revenue that was not made (e.g. if you could have billed those hours to a customer, but didn't). The resulting number could either be a big deal or not, depending on how big your organization is and how much time you spent on superfluous tests.