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Discussion on: How to convince my colleagues about the importance of automated testing

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vinney cavallo • Edited

Teaching by example should be effective - a small, elucidating example. If possible you should try to put together a 15 minute meeting with the developers and TDD-out a small feature live on a big screen. Or the next time a relatively small bug crops up, write a test by yourself that reproduces it and show the team how you fix it live turning that test green and fixing the bug at the same time.
I think once people witness live and first-hand how painless TDD makes designing and shoring up a new feature they will want to do it on their own. There is definitely a non-negligible learning curve though, so immediate adoption isn't likely.

For instance, I am pretty strict with TDD in my own comfort zone tech (Ruby, Rails) but even though the paradigm is the same I haven't yet taken the time to learn the testing tools around JavaScript so the idea of testing js scares me. I'm someone who is already fully on-board on the testing train and practice it personally, but testing in a "new" language is an impediment to me, so I can fully understand being resistant to the new idea of testing at all.

be patient and sell it!