this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2023
42 points (100.0% liked)
Experienced Devs
3921 readers
2 users here now
A community for discussion amongst professional software developers.
Posts should be relevant to those well into their careers.
For those looking to break into the industry, are hustling for their first job, or have just started their career and are looking for advice, check out:
- Logo base by Delapouite under CC BY 3.0 with modifications to add a gradient
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Two rules:
yea but if we both aren't really keen on writing tests and I review you, it would be in my lazy ass' interest to ๐ without tests.
That should be a disciplinary issue. The engineers in question should be brought forth in front of management to explain why they thought that this particular change should be exempt from testing and why this was not explained, in detail, in the code review.
And that's how you get teams to stop collaborating and turn your work environment to shit.
I think that instead of "forcing tests", you should instead focus on "proving quality." You think that works the way you thought? Cool. How do you know? What if they were to use 128 NUL bytes? Would it still do the right thing? Cool. How do you know?
Ensuring quality is a larger concept than simply writing tests, but writing tests is definitely part of it. I think if you aim higher and teach the provability of quality, then the better engineers will self-select by starting to write tests.
Additionally, if you're one person against the world, you're going to have a tough time. Build alliances. Partner with people who will reinforce the message. If you are the only one telling them something they don't like, they will shun you for it. But if you partner with allies who all have the same message, people are more likely to start to listen. It starts to become a community.
And if all else fails, prove the value of tests by going first. You can't force anyone to do anything. But you can start doing this yourself. At some point, if code gets called into question, you can look at the tests together to see what's covered and how that thing is supposed to work. It's all part of letting the robots do what the robots are good at, which frees you up to do the things that you're good at.