[senorjazz]

> because I spend half of my time writing tests.

Only half your time? You're doing testing wrong if it doesn't take 80% of the time ;-)

I have a love hate relationship with testing. Working for myself as a company of one, some of the benefits testing bring just don't apply. I have a suite of programs built in the style of your point (1). The programs were quick to market and hacked out whilst savings ran out not knowing if I would make a single sale.

Sales came, customer requests came, new features were wanted, sales were promised "if the program could just do xyz". More things was hacked on. The promise of "I will go back and do this properly and tidy up this god unholy mess of code" slowly slipped away that I stopped lying to myself I would do it.

Yes there was a phase of fix one problem add another, but I have most of that in my head now and has been a long time since that happened.

Not a single test. Developing the programs was "fun" and exciting. Getting requests for features in the morning and having the build ready by lunch kept customers happy.

Now I am redoing the apps as a web app for "reasons". This time am doing it properly, testing from the start. I know exactly what the program should do and how to do it, unlike the first time when I really had no idea. But still, I Come to a point and realise the design is wrong and I hadn't taking something into consideration. Changing the code isn't so bad, changing the tests, O.M.G.

I am so fed up of the project, I do all I can to avoid it, it is 2 years late, I wish I never started it. The codebase has excellent testing, mocks, no little hacks, engineering wise am proud of it. The tests have found little edge cases that would have been found out by customers so avoided that. But there is no fun in it. No excitement. Is just a constant drudging slog.

Am trying to avoid dismissing testing all together, as I really want to see the benefit of it in a production substantially code base. If I ever get there. At the moment, the code base is the best tested unused software ever written IMO

[moreaccountspls]

Well, then stop! Delete all the tests right now and do it however you want to do it.

The thing about testing that never really gets talked about it is, what's the penalty for regressions? What's the consequences if you ship a bug so bad the whole system stops working?

Well, if you're building a thing that's doing hundreds of millions in revenue, that might be a big deal. But you? You're a team of one! You rollback that bad deploy and basically no one cares!

Your customers certainly don't care if you ship bugs. If it was something important enough where they REALLY cared, they wouldn't be using a company of one person.

So, go for it. Dismiss tests until you get to a point where you fear deploying because of the consequences. Then add the bare minimum of e2e tests you need to get rid of that fear, and keep shipping.

[bleah1000]

There is another cost, if you try and fix a bug and break something else. If your codebase becomes so brittle that you feel like you can't do anything without breaking something else, that makes it unbearable to keep going with that project.

Having said all that, I find that it's better to avoid doing some unit tests when building your own project. It can be better to do the high level tests (some integration, focused on system) to make sure the major functionality works. In many cases, for an app that's not too complicated, you can just have a rough manual test plan. Then move to automated tests later on if the app gets popular, or the manual testing becomes too cumbersome.

It's still good to have a few unit tests for some tricky functions that do complicated things so you aren't spending hours debugging a simple typo.

[moreaccountspls]

Sure. My point wasn't really whether to write unit tests or not. It's more, do what works for you / your team to enable you to ship consistently. For the OP, spending all of their time writing tests clearly isn't working for them if they haven't shipped at all.

[monksy]

> Well, if you're building a thing that's doing hundreds of millions in revenue, that might be a big deal. But you? You're a team of one! You rollback that bad deploy and basically no one cares!

Human lives, customer faith in product, GDPR violations, HPPA violations, data, time/resources in space missions

https://medium.com/@ryancohane/financial-cost-of-software-bu...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter

[mercer]

> But you? You're a team of one! You rollback that bad deploy and basically no one cares!

I somehow doubt that comparing this 'team of one project' to the Mars Climate Orbiter leads to any useful conclusions. It's a nice bit of hyperbole though!

[monksy]

Rollbacks can create data loss. Also, rollbacks are not always a viable option.

Anyways..this was to address the issue of a bug. I took the comment of "it's just a team of one" as a way of trying to justify not putting your engineering due diligence into delivering a product to the customer.

[mercer]

> Rollbacks can create data loss. Also, rollbacks are not always a viable option.

I've delivered a number of products (in the early days of my career) to clients where data loss happened and while not fun, it also didn't significantly harm the product or piss off said client. I saw my responsibility primarily to do the best I could and clearly communicate potential risks to the client.

> I took the comment of "it's just a team of one" as a way of trying to justify not putting your engineering due diligence into delivering a product to the customer.

That I do agree with, but 'due diligence' is a very vague concept. I guess honest communication about the consequence of various choices is perhaps the core aspect?

And of course 'engineering due diligence', in my opinion, includes making choices that might lead to an inferior result from a 'purely' engineering perspective.

[moreaccountspls]

> not putting your engineering due diligence into delivering a product to the customer.

Yes. This is exactly what this person should do. Stop worrying about arbitrary rules and just deliver the damn product already. A hacky, shitty, unfinished product in your customer's hands that can be iterated on beats one that never got shipped at all every day of the week.

[moreaccountspls]

I don't understand your point. We're specifically talking about a one person company.

[claudiusd]

LOL. I guess I was being a bit conservative with that estimate!

I've worked for myself as well and know what you mean. In my situation, I was able to save myself from testing by telling my customers "this is a prototype so expect some issues".