Three myths about automated testing

Most teams know this matters. Fewer have decided who owns it. A few things about automated testing that get repeated more often than they get checked.

Most development decisions are really maintenance decisions wearing a different hat. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.

“It only matters for big sites”

Tests are how you change things without fear. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.

“We can deal with it after launch”

Sometimes true, usually expensive. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it.

“Our platform handles it”

A slow test suite is a suite nobody runs. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.

The short version

Code gets read far more often than it gets written, and usually by someone with less context than the author had. Three things worth confirming about automated testing before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• A slow test suite is a suite nobody runs — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Most of the value here comes from doing the first two things, not all of them.