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Bob Runstein on “The Software Inferno(How to convince management of the value of tests)

It can be difficult to convince people the value of unit tests.

In my experience, it’s easy to convince people, developers and managers alike, on the value of Unit Tests. It’s even easy to get everybody to agree to do them. What’s hard is getting developers to actually write them, maintain them, and even just run them.

You heard me right: Most people don’t give a flying fuck about actually doing Unit Testing.

They pay lip service to the idea because they are told it’s the right thing to do. Mostly I think developers find it hard to test code that has to work with external processes, databases, web servers and the like. It’s not until a developer goes through a Test-Develop-Test-Release-Fail-Test-Develop-Test-Release cycle that they even begin to see the real benefit. And even then they still might just not do it.

I always say my piece about Unit Testing, but whatever the outcome is I will always write tests. For me, it’s the same as repeatable builds, continuous integration, and even source control.