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Category: Culture

The myth of “unstable” code

The most common reason I get for people delaying test automation is that the code is “unstable”, and automating too soon will result in a lot of re-work of automation. Better to only automate after a feature is “stable”, i.e. development work is all done, they say, so you won’t have to rework any of… Read more

Gatekeeping in testing

We often talking about gatekeeping in testing as a problem in the sense that testers shouldn’t be the ones that decide when something goes out to production. But “gatekeeping” can also be used in the sense of excluding others. In fan communities you might hear “you aren’t a real Marvel fan if you’ve only seen… Read more

Three ways to make metrics suck less

Everybody loves to hate metrics. I get it. There are a lot of terrible metrics out there in the software development and testing world. People still propose counting commits or test cases as a measure of productivity. It’s garbage. But I also believe that measuring something can be a useful way to understand aspects of… Read more

Why are developers against testability?

A number of times in my career, I’ve come across developers who were determined that application code should never be changed just to facilitate testing. Even when everybody recognizes that flakey tests are a problem, somehow adding testability features to the app itself to fix that flakiness is beyond the pale. It is a belief… Read more

Regression and Functional tests are meaningless

I have a major pet peeve with any test strategy that includes something called “regression tests”. I recently saw someone ask, “Do we need to run regression tests on a project where the CI/CD pipeline runs all tests on any git commit?” On a different project, someone asked, “Now that we run this new test… Read more