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Discussion on: 3- Why Should I Write Tests While Developing Software?

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John Peters

I disagree. And so does Agile and gated check-ins. I successfully write new tests for every push and have been doing it for years. It allows me to refactor at will.

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Mike Talbot ⭐ • Edited

Weirdly I kind of agree with both of you, I've seen a lot of projects where tests exist and pass but don't actually capture bugs that exist in the software. This gives a false sense of security. I'm guessing that John has a well developed sense of how to write tests for his code and therefore benefits from them greatly.

I personally find writing tests on the back end to be more helpful than exercising the code via a front end - for me its faster to develop. On the front end, I'd prefer integration tests to ensure we haven't broken flows.

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Hamit SEYREK

First of all, thank you for sharing your ideas. I'm learning some things from all of you and it makes me think :)
I also partially agree with both of you. A manual test is always needed in projects where user experience is very important. But when working with DevOps teams, automated testing is vital to the process. Automated tests are also more cost-effective as they do not require constant control.

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John Peters

Hi Mike, true story: I once put in a fix on an IBM midrange that was declared defective in a week. Total cost was over $1 million USD because it went through 37 translations for each country. They didn't fire me, but I had checked out about 10 books on Software testing. The best was from Boris Bezier. That's how I picked up skilled testing techniques.