Automated Testing: Why is it important?

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Have you been burnt by bad automated testing?

When we go to software engineering conferences we often talk about the benefits of automated testing. As we’ve had private conversations with a lot of the people we often find that they have had really bad experiences with applications that have just had tests that were not a benefit.

They honestly made development harder.

Good testing = faster development

It is really important how you build the automated tests; if built right, they are lifesavers.

Automated testing is my backup. They have my back so I am able to go in and make a changes in the codebase and have the confidence that I am not going to break anything without knowing about it.

This dramatically increases my ability to code in complex projects.

With automated testing, our developers are able to make adjustments and enhancement with tons of confidence.

I can run the test suite, find any functionality that is broken, fix it, and move on. I don’t have the overhead of worrying about problems popping up for the users because my automated tests show me where the issues are.

On the other hand, if you talk to developers who are in larger applications that don’t have tests, they spend tons of time trying to figure out what is broken and why. Our developers just don’t do that.

The end result is that, with a growing code base, our team is able to be incredibly efficient in our work, saving our clients time and money.

Often what happens in projects without testing is there comes a point where nobody wants to make adjustments to the code because they don’t know what will happen when something changes.

So what do they do?

Star over and rebuild the project. What started out as “we don’t have time to write tests” has now lead to a complete re-write.

Did that save any time? Not in the long run.

But if you write tests into your codebase (we can even write tests before the code it is testing to help guide the process), you end up with a product that is very maintainable for a very long time. Some of our projects have been around for 10+ years at this point, and because of their test suites, they continue to be effective and run relatively bug free.

Contact us if you need consultation on your software project.

 

 

Originally published on 2020-01-17 by Royce Hall

Reach out to us to discuss your complex deployment needs (or to chat about Star Trek)