[notacoward]

It saddens me too, but it still seems necessary. In my (quite long and varied) experience, most developers do not appreciate the value of regression tests. Therefore, reminders and positive reinforcement are still beneficial.

[R0b0t1]

It is possible to make useless tests.

[notacoward]

Does that seem like a strong argument to you? Of course it's possible to make useless tests. It's possible to be injured by an airbag. It's possible to overdose on a drug that usually saves lives. That doesn't mean any of these things aren't generally beneficial, or that they should be foregone.

As I said recently on Twitter, I've measured the likely cost of production bugs that were fixed early by static analysis, by leaving log messages to mark where the bug would have occurred. I know that's not the same as regression tests, but if anything it's even more of a long shot, more of a hard sell to my fellow developers, and even in that case the value was strongly positive. About a half million 2005 dollars in that case, for less than a fifth of that in license costs and my own time. The ROI for regression tests is likely to be in the same ballpark.

The fact that something can be done poorly by lazy people is in no way an argument against trying to do it well, or even semi-competently, by people who take their profession seriously.

[jhugo]

I think it's a big assumption that the ROI of tests in general is in the same ballpark as the ROI of static analysis.

In my experience, many tests written in commercial software engineering have ~zero or even negative ROI. This mostly applies to micro-level testing like unit tests; macro-level testing like integration tests can be fantastically valuable and I've even come to believe that they're the only type of tests most teams should spend time writing.

[pmarreck]

It depends on how you design your software and where the API surfaces are and how isolated the pieces can be made to be.

Which, if you're writing unit tests at the same time as the unit under test, leads naturally to pro-isolation, pro-modular designs, which are both easier to test, more reliable and generally have a more concise purpose.

[notacoward]

Well, we were talking about regression tests, which are much closer to integration tests than unit tests, so I'm not sure we actually disagree. Writing regression tests is still valuable, and still too rare.

[pmarreck]

Yeah, what exactly are you arguing, here? "assert 1=1" is a useless test, that doesn't invalidate tests whatsoever