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Cake day: June 27th, 2023

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  • Focusing on code coverage (which doesn’t distinguish between more and less important parts of the code) seems like the opposite of your very good (IMO) recommendation in another comment to focus on specific high-value use-cases.

    From my experience it’s far easier to sell the need for specific tests if they are framed as “we need assurances that this component does not fail under conceivable usecases” and specially as “we were screwed by this bug and we need to be absolutely sure we don’t experience it ever again.”

    Code coverage is an OK metric and I agree with tracking it, but I wouldn’t recommend making it a target. It might force developers to write tests, but it probably won’t convince them. And as a developer I hate feeling “forced” and prefer if at all possible to use consensus to decide on team practices.


  • We can’t test yet, we’re going to make changes soon

    This could be a good opportunity to introduce the concept of test-driven development (TDD) without the necessity to “write tests first”. But I think it can help illustrate why having tests is better when you are expecting to make changes because of the safety they provide.

    “When we make those changes, wouldn’t it be great to have more confidence that the business logic didn’t break when adding a new technical capability?”

    You shouldn’t have to refactor to test something

    This seems like a reasonable statement and I sort of agree, in the sense that for existing production code, making a code change which only adds new tests yet also requires refactoring of existing functionality might feel a bit risky. As other commenters mentioned, starting with writing tests for new features or fixes might help prevent folks feeling like they are refactoring to test. Instead they’re refactoring and developing for the feature and the tests feel like they contribute to that feature as well.