There's some good advice here, but this is ridiculous: > But, on another side tests slows you down as you build features. When your team writes tests they need

There's some good advice here, but this is ridiculous: > But, on another side tests slows you down as you build features. When your team writes tests they need 2x more time to release any feature. Tests are an investment in fast future development. Last I did a startup, we did not write tests for anything throwaway or experimental. But once we decided some chunk of code was a keeper (e.g., experiment had a positive result), we wrote tests. With just a team of 6, we were releasing a few times a day, not just once a week. And we had no "QA freeze" nonsense, because our tests were solid enough that we didn't need manual QA to release. That said, I hired for people who were good at writing tests, and we did pair programming with frequent pair rotation, which gave us a big quality boost and helped keep our test suite lean and effective. I can believe that some startup teams have low enough levels of testing skill that "they need 2x more time to release any feature".