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How many companies in the Valley develop software with tests?

4 points by JohnnieWalker ↗ HN
Hi, I just moved to "The Valley" from London to work for a startup. I am shocked that nobody in this company thinks that writing tests is a worth cause (or at least one that we can afford). I assumed that on this day on age the value of tests was a given. I am told by my peers that here in "The Valley" writing tests doesn't fly because the need to produce software fast and the ability to pivot within days. Is this REALLY the case?

2 comments

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PufferBuffer
Yeah man. Tests take forever to develop. It's a lot easier to test manually, upon release. Sure, something is usually broken, but the time saved on rigorous testing is worth it.
DanielN
If writing tests for your code is difficult and takes too much time, that is a pretty strong code smell that you're writing unmaintainable code or you are working within an unmaintainable system.

As to the OP's question, the only reasonable scenarios for not writing tests are weekend project style web apps and projects coming out of ad agency style shops where the lifetime of a given project is so short and rushed it doesn't matter whether the code base is maintainable.

The vast majority of places I've talked to in the valley, from three man startups to 100 developer shops, have reported some respectable level of code coverage. It is my opinion that you can read something significant into what is expected of your work and the priorities of the company based on their testing policies.