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Many people think that test suite authoring is easy mode. It really isn't. Making a good test suite that actually does a good job of tracking invariants is a ro
by salawat 5y ago
Many people think that test suite authoring is easy mode. It really isn't. Making a good test suite that actually does a good job of tracking invariants is a royal pain.
- ljm 5y agoAs far as I'm concerned, writing tests is a different skillset and its often underdeveloped. It then snowballs into hating testing, because all you've experienced is a poor test suite that gets worse over time. It's hard to do well as you say, and it also gets glossed over in code review as long as the tests pass. Do the tests actually verify anything useful? Who knows, build is green! That's how you get an application with 50,000 unit and integration tests that you can't run locally, and requires massive parallelism in CI to finish in any reasonable timeframe.
- jamesfinlayson 5y agoMy favourite is the test suite where each test relies on data from every other test, so running a test in isolation fails, and adding a new test is almost impossible without breaking a bunch of other tests.
- salawat 5y agoUgh. Cross test dependency. Mine is lack of future-proofing. Using dates stuck at one point in time. Or worse, the test suite that fails because of local clock skew.