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I'll happily grant the point that unit tests are, to a considerable extent, the price you pay for putting more developers in charge of the same parts of the cod

I'll happily grant the point that unit tests are, to a considerable extent, the price you pay for putting more developers in charge of the same parts of the codebase. In my line of work that's usually not a concern, but I can see merit in the idea for large teams. I also think that statement scales down in the sense that unit tests rarely make sense for code written and maintained by one or two people.

fsloth 9y ago
"I also think that statement scales down in the sense that unit tests rarely make sense for code written and maintained by one or two people." I am maintaining several end user critical projects related to data transform and transport, mostly by myself. I have no idea how I could develop them as efficiently without unit tests to verify my changes don't brake some corner case as new features are added. The cadence for changes can be fairly low - I might return to some component after doing something else for six months, and I probably need to add some feature without breaking something in the process. Sure, we have integration testing and smoke testing, but the further a bug travels the release pipeline from the developer the more expensive it is to fix. This cost cascade is quite easy to visualize - the work of whomever caught the bug is stopped, and depending where they are located in the product ecosystem their stall can cause lots of work for other people. If they are a tester they need to file a report. If they are a customer, their work is interrupted, they contact local sales, who then contact global helpdesk, who then identify and log the bug. Much simpler and easier if there is a unit test to catch the bug in the first place. Now, there can be domain specific flavors to this. My domain is computational geometry and transport of 3D modeling data between domains. But in my domain anyone not securing their code with unit tests is wasting their employers money and setting their end users at risk by increasing the likelihood of bugs. There is lot of cargo cult nonsense in software engineering. Unit testing is not one of them. It saves time and effort by catching a range of bugs not caught by e.g. compiler for statically typed language and it secures the program logic for future changes.

fsloth 9y ago

"I also think that statement scales down in the sense that unit tests rarely make sense for code written and maintained by one or two people." I am maintaining several end user critical projects related to data transform and transport, mostly by myself. I have no idea how I could develop them as efficiently without unit tests to verify my changes don't brake some corner case as new features are added. The cadence for changes can be fairly low - I might return to some component after doing something else for six months, and I probably need to add some feature without breaking something in the process. Sure, we have integration testing and smoke testing, but the further a bug travels the release pipeline from the developer the more expensive it is to fix. This cost cascade is quite easy to visualize - the work of whomever caught the bug is stopped, and depending where they are located in the product ecosystem their stall can cause lots of work for other people. If they are a tester they need to file a report. If they are a customer, their work is interrupted, they contact local sales, who then contact global helpdesk, who then identify and log the bug. Much simpler and easier if there is a unit test to catch the bug in the first place. Now, there can be domain specific flavors to this. My domain is computational geometry and transport of 3D modeling data between domains. But in my domain anyone not securing their code with unit tests is wasting their employers money and setting their end users at risk by increasing the likelihood of bugs. There is lot of cargo cult nonsense in software engineering. Unit testing is not one of them. It saves time and effort by catching a range of bugs not caught by e.g. compiler for statically typed language and it secures the program logic for future changes.