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by mschuster91 943 days ago
> Somewhere, somewhen, we, as software developers, started thinking that other programmers would rather extend code rather than modify it.

That was when stuff like "proper testing" was deemed to be too expensive. It's unlikely to break existing workflows with extending something, but very easy to do so during a modification.

Companies used to have hordes of manual testers/QA staff, that all got replaced by automated tools of questionable utility and capability.
1 comments
wizzwizz4 943 days ago
The tools are very useful, and they have well-known capability. That capability is strictly less than the capability of most manual testers / QA staff, but it's a lot faster at it, and gets much closer to being exhaustive.

Automation should mean you can do a better job, more efficiently, more easily. Unfortunately, ever since the Industrial Revolution, it seems to mean you can do a quicker job with less money spent on labour costs.

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mschuster91 943 days ago
> That capability is strictly less than the capability of most manual testers / QA staff, but it's a lot faster at it, and gets much closer to being exhaustive.

That's if you put the effort in to write good tests. When I look at the state of gaming in general, it's ... pretty obvious that this hasn't worked out. Or the GTA Online JSON debacle - I'm dead sure that this was known internally for a long time, but no one dared to modify it.

And even then: an automated test can't spot other issues unrelated to the test that a human would spot immediately. Say, a CSS bug causes the logo to be displayed in grayscale. The developer who has accidentally placed the filter on all img elements writes a testcase that checks if an img element in content is rendered in greyscale, the tests pass, the branch gets merged without further human review... and boom.

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wizzwizz4 943 days ago
We do actually have automated testing tools for that. https://bbc.github.io/wraith/ is one: see the write-up https://responsivenews.co.uk/post/56884056177/wraith or a contemporary interview https://source.opennews.org/articles/responsive-css-testing-... .

I get your overall point, though.

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