Don't give up on your tests
It’s a new day and you are about to start a new project. It’s not a public/open source project, it’s a private one, for the company you are working for.
You sit together with your team and everyone is excited about the possibility to use new technologies and play with all the new tools everyone is talking about in conferences, blog posts, twitter and wherever else.
And another important thing: Everyone in the team agrees that the project should definitely have automated tests. You should start small, with some unit tests, maybe some behavior tests with Behat and so on.
As time goes by people start not to pay so much attention to tests anymore. It’s just one or two not tested methods, or classes, or packages… You know, it’s just for one feature that we need to deliver as soon as possible, or it’s just because this one is hard to test because it requires some dependencies, or maybe this other one is so simple that is kind of useless to test it. The reasons don’t matter, the thing is that little by little the team is leaving tests behind and when someone tries to run the test suite he/she will get some errors, or a lot of errors and then tests will become real dead code, because no one wants to fix them and no one is brave enough to just delete them.
Without tests the project starts to get harder to maintain. Small changes can explode things in unexpected places and the team’s motivation drops down and then everyone will again just want for the new project, the fresh start, the chance to make things right.
I know sometimes it’s hard to maintain the tests and keep them running and useful, but trust me, good tests will pay off well. Good tests will prevent sending issues to production.
Good tests can also help newcomers to the project, because they can read code and tests in order to understand a given behavior and, of course, tests will fail if something is wrong, and that is usually the case when making your first changes in a project :)
My message here is: Don’t give up on your tests. Please! Tests will help keep your project healthy, keep your team not afraid of changes and keep devs happy (or, at least, not sad or afraid).
If you are interested I have some more thoughts about this subject in the Rakuten Europe Tech Blog.
Evaldo Junior
Web developer, writer, speaker, Free and Open Source Software contributor and sometimes a gamer and a guitar and ukulele player.