[TIP] testing: why bother?

Doug Hellmann doug.hellmann at gmail.com
Wed Mar 23 09:17:43 PDT 2011


On Mar 23, 2011, at 9:43 AM, John Arbash Meinel wrote:

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> On 3/23/2011 2:06 PM, Alfredo Deza wrote:
>> Hi list,
>> 
>> I am about to give a presentation about testing in a couple of days and
>> the audience is in its majority a 
>> "we do not write tests" one :(
>> 
> 
> You do ad-hoc testing all the time. Everyone does for any work they do
> (you did at least check that it works when you were done, right? That's
> a test).
> 
> If you can automate the ad-hoc tests that everyone is doing, you get to
> do them 'for free' and save yourself the time of actually remembering
> all the different tests that you want to do against a given piece of code.

I forget where I heard it, but this rings true for me:

	If you have a repeatable manual process, you're doing the computer's job.

Doug




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