[dagw]

Sometimes you have to take a long term perspective. I've got a codebase here at work that bunch of people have been hacking along on without tests, taking the approach you use, and for the first couple of years it all went swimmingly. Now however things have greatly slowed down since the initial design wasn't thought through the lack of any sort of testing framework makes refactoring a pain, adding new features really annoying and finding subtle bugs is far harder than it should be. So I've basically had to stop development while I try to add tests so that I can find out what is connected to what and how things break when I change things.

The flip side of all of this is of course that adding too much bureaucracy up front might have killed much of the initial developing velocity the project had and we might not have come as far as fast.