[BlargMcLarg]

Counterpoint, I've not seen seniority affect these outcomes at all. Most of the time I see some management type or CTO heavily push the "code coverage / test everything" narrative which then rolls down the hill. Strategy did not seem at all correlated with seniority.

Same goes for prototyping. I don't see much of a correlation between willingness to prototype and seniority, either.

[icedchai]

I worked at a place that had a "increase test coverage" dogma. If you ran out of real work, which was common due to poor management, you'd wind up with an awful "increase test coverage to 80%" ticket to keep you busy. This resulted in at least one guy quitting because he said it was a useless waste of time.

[hynek]

I can assure you that it is possible and meaningful to have full code coverage in certain contexts (for instance for important projects that get only rarely touched) and doesn’t inevitably lead to bad test suites.

Railing against code coverage is at this point just as dogma as insisting on it.

[BlargMcLarg]

Not sure why you're highlighting this in a sub-thread regarding the importance of context. Surely this was already implied?

What I'm railing against is the idea that seniority is a prime indicator to the effective strategy parent comment insists on, which simply doesn't mirror my experiences. What I see is juniors picking up the habits of their superiors. They're learning this dogmatism from somewhere.

[hynek]

I’m sorry I’ve apparently misunderstood your point. I guess I’ve never seen too brass imparting more than a big picture “we’re writing tests now”.

[iratewizard]

Depends on the industry and client. Some industries have a lot of consultants that don't write code but will tell you 80% is the minimum. Some contracts stipulate code coverage deliverables. Some platforms like Salesforce count lines of code covered and prevent deployments unless 75% and passing.

[iratewizard]

> Same goes for prototyping. I don't see much of a correlation between willingness to prototype and seniority, either.

Willingness is one thing, but getting yelled at for learning and doing your best is another. I never treat my Juniors like that, and encourage a 75/25 working/improving split. Still, several frequently get anxiety about how long it's taking them to clear tickets.