[foxfluff]

> I wonder what would need to happen to convince people that ..

3. It's worth it.

I work at (relatively) low levels, and I would absolutely love to have extensive tests (plus more, e.g. TLA+ models to prove critical properties of the systems I work on).

The pushback comes from stakeholders. They don't want to invest time and money into automated testing.

And when no automated testing has been done yet, you can guess that the system hasn't been architected to be easily testable. Figuring out how to add useful tests without massive (time-consuming and expensive, potentially error-prone) re-architecting is also something that requires quite a bit of investment.

Of course a part of is just lack of experience. If someone who knows how it's done could lead by example and show the ropes, that'd probably help. Getting the framework off the ground could be the key to sneaking in some tests in the future, even when nobody asks for them.

[rad_gruchalski]

I did tests for something like this once. Not low level, more of a set of 30+ microservices but the concept is there. The black box testing. This was for a smart home solution based on RabbitMQ. The client wanted to replace RabbitMQ with Kafka but they were anxious because there was no way to verify that the replacement would behave the same way.

So we have spent 2 months writing black box tests against the RabbitMQ version, swapped it out with Kafka and fixed all issues within a couple of weeks.

Since then, I believe that the integration tests are so much more valuable than unit tests.