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How do you get your team to write tests? (programming.dev)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I'm like a test unitarian. Unit tests? Great. Integration tests? Awesome. End to end tests? If you're into that kind of thing, go for it. Coverage of lines of code doesn't matter. Coverage of critical business functions does. I think TDD can be a cult, but writing software that way for a little bit is a good training exercise.

I'm a senior engineer at a small startup. We need to move fast, ship new stuff fast, and get things moving. We've got CICD running mocked unit tests, integration tests, and end to end tests, with patterns and tooling for each.

I have support from the CTO in getting more testing in, and I'm able to use testing to cover bugs and regressions, and there's solid testing on a few critical user path features. However, I get resistance from the team on getting enough testing to prevent regressions going forward.

The resistance is usually along lines like:

You shouldn't have to refactor to test something
We shouldn't use mocks, only integration testing works.
- Repeat for test types N and M
We can't test yet, we're going to make changes soon.

How can I convince the team that the tools available to them will help, and will improve their productivity and cut down time having to firefight?

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

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.

[–] Skyzyx 1 points 1 year ago

I think it depends. If you have to refactor in order to test, you probably built it poorly the first time around.

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