[fardo]

> the lack of testing

Having worked on very long-running projects, testing or well-funded QA doesn’t tend to save you from organizational issues.

What typically seems to happen is tests rot, as tests often seem to have a shelf life. Eventually some subset of the tests start to die - usually because of some combination of dependency issues, API expectations changes, security updates, account and credential expirations, machine endpoint and state updates, and so on - and because the results from the test no longer indicate correctness of the program, and the marginal business value of fixing one individual broken test is typically very low, they often either get shut off entirely, or are “forced to pass” even if they ought to be an error.

Repeat for a decade or two and there quickly start being “the tests we actually trust”, and “the tests we’re too busy to actually fix or clean up.”

Which tests are the good ones and bad ones quickly become tribal knowledge that gets lost with job and role changes, and at some point, the mass of “tests that are lying that they’re working” and “tests we no longer care to figure out if they’re telling the truth that they’re failing” itself becomes accidentally load-bearing.