You're not a good Indie Developer if you don't write test cases: I said it.

I don’t claim to be an expert indie dev, but I am an active one. I’ve spent the last year building Quotes App and MovieFlix, and honestly, the process taught me more than any tutorial could. With 200+ GitHub stars between them, I figured it was time to share what I’ve learned about the solo dev grind

Being an indie dev is about wearing a dozen hats, but being a solid developer is the foundation no one talks about. You don’t need to be the next Mark Zuckerberg.

You just need to understand your project’s whole context so you aren’t spending your weekends frustrated, debugging code that’s failing silently.

 Mastering your project’s context is the ultimate energy saver. It lets you hand off the coding to agents and actually relax, knowing that if something goes sideways, you’ll see it coming a mile away. Less burnout, more shipping.

As an app developer who markets and builds everything solo, my time and energy are my most important assets. Both are unfortunately limited. You really don’t want to spend your whole life on a single project that is eventually just a gamble. It’s hard to justify spending endless hours of frustration building an app when you don’t even know if it will be worth it yet.

My main principle for building projects is simple: I want the highest ROI for the lowest amount of time. Testing is a huge part of that.

While testing is important early on, it becomes a literal lifesaver once your product succeeds and you start growing a team. When a newbie with zero context starts making changes to your app, that’s usually when all hell breaks loose. 

That is exactly why knowing the basics and being a good developer is so vital. It’s the only way to keep the foundation solid while things are moving fast.

Lets Talk about testing  

Since I mentioned that time and energy are my most valuable assets, you might think writing tests is just a waste of both. But let me tell you why that’s not true.

Let me describe a real scenario that happened in 2 of my apps

 MovieFlix: A ticking time bomb

I had a feature that scheduled movie notifications, then deleted them from the DB after 10 seconds.

When i tested manually on my device. The notification popped up. Everything looked fine.

But when I wrote an automated test, I found a ‘silent killer.’ The background worker was crashing immediately after the notification because it was missing a TypeConverter for the database.

The failure was invisible. To the user, the notification worked, but under the hood, the database cleanup never happened. ‘Dead data’ was piling up, and because the entry was never deleted, the user would be stuck unable to reschedule that movie ever again.

This is the trap: the part I could see (the notification) was fine, but the part that mattered for the app’s long-term health was failing silently. Without that test, I was shipping a time bomb

That’s exactly where testing becomes vital. When you can’t see the result instantly — like with a scheduled task or an async feature — your result is just a promise for the future. You need to be 100% sure the logic is actually going to deliver that result when the time comes.

Quotes App: A Hacktoberfest saga

Last year, my app was part of Hacktoberfest. It was a win-win: I got help building features I wanted, and other people got the chance to contribute to an open-source project.

But this is where testing became a non-negotiable part of the process. I was essentially trusting my code to developers who had zero context about how the app worked. When people are jumping in to fix bugs or add features, you need a safety net. You have to make sure that while they’re building something new, they aren’t accidentally breaking the things that already work perfectly.

To handle this, I added a workflow that runs on every pull request. It automatically checks if the new code breaks any existing features. If the checks pass, I know the code is solid and ready to go.

This setup was a massive time-saver. I didn’t have to manually review every single PR anymore. If a contribution was low ROI, I’d just merge it as long as the checks passed. That allowed me to stop micromanaging the small stuff and focus my energy on the bigger, more essential features.

Ok i showed you why testing is important , but how to do it correctly?

Look, don’t try to test everything. Life is way too short to aim for 100% code coverage. You aren’t a massive corporate entity with unlimited resources; you’re a solo dev.

Focus on the Spine: the core business logic. This is the engine of your app — the data rules, the storage, and the background processes — the core business logic- the reason your users use the app

I test for High ROI. I don’t waste time testing the ‘Skin’ (the UI) because if a button is missing, I’ll see it the moment I run the app. I spend my time testing the silent logic that I can’t see.

If your UI has a bug, it’s a glitch. If your business logic has a bug, it’s a data disaster. Stop testing the paint job and start testing the engine. Secure the core, skip the fluff, and ship code that actually works.

Use AI agents to write your test cases. Don’t start writing them manually from scratch. Today, agents are smart enough to generate the base tests for your project, but you must always cross-check the results. 

Never be completely dependent on them. Like I said, being a good developer is a necessity. When you can delegate the repetitive work to save time and energy, do it.

That is all from me for today. Bye!