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No,your skepticism is warranted and I'll back you up here. "Best Practice" is a common excuse I hear from juniors to justify cargo cult coding. The example of "
by lr4444lr 6y ago
No,your skepticism is warranted and I'll back you up here. "Best Practice" is a common excuse I hear from juniors to justify cargo cult coding. The example of "testing" being evoked a "best practice" is strained. Testing is not a "best practice", it's a basic step in software design where you have accountability for results. It can be done wrong.
- kayodelycaon 6y agoEven testing is a nuanced argument. The application I’m working is one of the few exceptions to skipping testing. I have basic tests around the data import and export classes but everything else is manually tested. The reason? It’s a small, rapidly-built prototype hooking two poorly documented systems together while the company makes daily adjustments to the manual process I’m automating. Everything is in flux because we have just started working with a new vendor that will significantly improve our logistics. All of the chaos is deliberately considered and discussed weekly. (I’m in all of those discussions.) It’s really beautiful to see this all come together. Once we’ve figured out how this will work, it’s time to firm up the internals and nail it down with tests. Even if that day never comes, the application has extensive logging (~75% of the application code is devoted to highly detailed logs) and production errors will quickly be detected, with enough information to manually fix a bad import or export. Once edge cases do come up, you can bet I’ll write tests to prevent regressions.