Programmer Humor

It's common in critical projects.

After many years (10+), I finally find a company that actually, really, implements CI/CD. Then I look at the tests and it's actually the most inane shit imaginable, tacked on top of ancient existing code, not maintained. I spent more time fixing the stupid tests than actually fixing the bugs I was tasked fixing. Amazing.

We test the shit out of our Apis. We do more API level/integration testing though.

I.e. a test will be something like "if the db is in this state, and we hit this endpoint with these params, does it return what we expect and update the db correctly".

Our app is primarily about users maintaining stuff on big datasets with complicated aggregation and approval logic. So setting up a scenario and checking the app does what the business logic says it will do is what we want to know.

It makes refactoring wayyyyy less painful to just know that the app will always behave itself. Rather than testing whether a function can add 1 + 2 correctly, we can test each endpoint does what it's supposed to do.

It gives us loads of confidence that the backend is doing what it's supposed to. If you do a huge refactor you don't need to worry about whether you broke the test or if the test is failing correctly. If the tests all pass everything is working as it should.

Downside is longer test execution times (because a temporary db needs set up) when running the full suite. Worth the trade off for us though.

Meanwhile I'm very upset our unit test coverage is only 40%.

Like, it's the number 1 priority for the principle & staff engineers to get that up to 80% across the codebase.