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I'm genuinely shocked at the number of people I see on here bashing automated testing as a waste of time, simply because my entire career has taught me the opposite (and it's usually only non-technical managers I see who don't want to see "time wasted" writing tests.)

I'm also just as genuinely curious - what do you guys do instead? Just don't test and deal with production issues as they occur? Pass it off to a separate UAT / human-based testing department and let them sign it off? Assume that because you're using Haskell / some other discipline it'll work if it compiles?

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  • 2
    Everything is according to the word of god!
  • 4
    Haskell people will be the first to tell you that testing is crucial. A proof just proves the thing you're proving given the assumptions you make to prove it, nothing more nothing less.

    Software industry in general tends to be a lot more lax about testing (especially automatic stuff) than it really should be - it's just that usually stuff is not so critical where not having testing is more expensive than having it, I guess. Or such an incident hasn't happened yet. I can't explain it any other way. It's also a legit skill that you need to learn.
  • 1
    Personally at my company we are supposed to write unit tests but we never really end up doing them as they are seen as things to do when there’s nothing else to do, so they’re never done essentially. We instead try to test everything by hand and then hand off the result to our colleagues who do tests the software in a more user-like fashion. To clarify it is part of their jobs to test software.
  • 2
    It’s not a waste of time
    Unit testing is very useful to define expected output so you can have an idea everything should be working

    However the attitude probably stems from
    It being tedious and time consuming to write these tests and they’re not budgeted the time to
  • 1
    @Earu good thing features never break after they first get released
  • 1
    Unit testing is almost a waste of time, if you are a small company, Property based testing, integration testing and BDD is the way to go.
  • 0
    @Crost, lol yeah they do break that’s in fact our biggest problem when we release a new version, but we keep a journal of tests to do, to check if previously implemented features still work as they should.
  • 1
    @Earu I see no reason that won't be a sustainable approach for years to come. Have fun :)
  • 0
    @Crost tell me which buzzword makes me want to a punch a millennial that was just used
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  • 0
    The automated testing environment should be so fast and convenient that manual testing is seen as a waste of time. That's not the case where I work at, so everything is only @SortOfTested.
  • 1
    I am web backend + DevOps.
    I am not just starting from unit tests.
    I begin the work with building CI CD pipeline and test things all the way thorough automatically deployed staging environment.

    And without tests I feel insecure and paranoid. Tests give me assurance and confidence to move forward. To boldly go where no man has gone before.
  • 0
    Everyone learns code to run first. For some people that’s hard enough. It also takes more than a manager saying “we need tests”
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