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Possibly stupid question: is automated testing actually a common practice? (programming.dev)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/ask_experienced_devs@programming.dev
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Referring more to smaller places like my own - few hundred employees with ~20 person IT team (~10 developers).

I read enough about testing that it seems industry standard. But whenever I talk to coworkers and my EM, it's generally, "That would be nice, but it's not practical for our size and the business would allow us to slow down for that." We have ~5 manual testers, so things aren't considered "untested", but issues still frequently slip through. It's insurance software so at least bugs aren't killing people, but our quality still freaks me out a bit.

I try to write automated tests for my own code, since it seems valuable, but I avoid it whenever it's not straightforward. I've read books on testing, but they generally feel like either toy examples or far more effort than my company would be willing to spend. Over time I'm wondering if I'm just overly idealistic, and automated testing is more of a FAANG / bigger company thing.

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[–] 14 points 2 years ago (1 child)

I've never worked (recently) at a shop that didn't do some level of automated testing. In terms of having a bunch of people working on a big codebase without stuff being randomly broken most of the time, I'd say it's an absolute requirement to do it to at least some passable level.

In my experience it's, if anything, sometimes the opposite way -- like they insist on having testing even when the value of it the way it's being implemented is a little debatable. But yes I think it's important enough in terms of keeping things productive and detecting when something is totally-broken that you need to.

(Especially now when you can literally just paste a module into GPT and ask it to generate some sorta-stupid-but-maybe-good-enough test cases for it and with minimal tweaking you can get the whole thing in in like 10 minutes.)

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 2 years ago

    like they insist on having testing even when the value of it the way it’s being implemented is a little debatable

    I started to feel like I was this guy when I asked someone to test their code after multiple sprints of being sent back from QA. Good to hear I'm not the crazy one, I guess.

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