[shrub]

Unfortunately our sales people are obsessed with agreeing to whatever customers dictate in order to make a sale. The customer wants a full featured, fully customized, fully automated E-commerce solution and they want it for a flat $5000? Sold. Customer says "What is this 'testing' sh*t on the quote? It should just work the first time, or do you only have a Jr developer on staff who needs everything double checked for them? We can go some place more professional" and sales person replies "Oh yeah, that - you're right. Our developer is a wizard and I forgot to take that off."

No matter how many times I explain or quote higher or tell them the feature creep is becoming unreasonable (oh by the way, we have 18 products with complicated interactions, not the 3 we asked for on the quote, but we expect to still pay the same), such that I can't possibly write it all and test it all, they just don't listen and they leave me holding the bag. So, while I'd like to do testing, just getting the thing kind-of working isn't in the budget, never mind getting it working well.

Sorry for the rant and... come to think of it, it may be time for a new job.

[jdminhbg]

I'm not a testing fanatic, but I do TDD. I don't put "testing" on the invoice any more than I would put "typing" or "refactoring." That's internal to my process of delivering quality software, and either you like my estimates/deliveries or you don't.

But... it does sound like you need a new job.

[pavelkaroukin]

Do not include testing into bill. It is quite confusing for somebody outside of software development and I find their comments about jr. developers quite reasonable. Just put number of hours or amount to cover development and writing tests.

[brown9-2]

I don't understand why you would include testing in the invoice separate from development. It makes it seem like an activity that could be eliminated if need be.

But, are you really going to deliver code that you developed without testing it in some way? You might not be writing test code, but I'd bet you are still doing testing of some other kind.