The way I think about tests is: what’s the cost of failure here vs the cost of testing? Sometimes, bugs in this part of the codebase would not be a showstopper

The way I think about tests is: what’s the cost of failure here vs the cost of testing? Sometimes, bugs in this part of the codebase would not be a showstopper, so why test as heavily? The most important tests by far are smokescreen integration tests for critical paths through the system. I tend to care much less about other tests in many cases. Obviously, if I was writing a compiler or database or medical software, that’d be different. But I’m generally writing web applications where if the entire application were to fail for a day, we probably wouldn’t even lose a customer.