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by resonious
935 days ago
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The problem here (in my mind) is that hindsight is 20/20, so you can always look at a bug and say that a test could've prevented it. But in the author's case, it sounds like they still have bugs despite all the tests, so I guess the people writing the tests just aren't very skilled? And if that's the case, couldn't a more skilled engineer just write better code to begin with? I totally get tests as a way to prevent known incidents from happening again. But tests as a way of preventing unknown issues seems dubious to me. |
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True. At my previous job, I used a new C compiler [1] that revealed a bug due to undefined behavior [2]. It was a two-line fix, but my manager at the time refused to accept the fix unless I 1) made a test that showed the error, and 2) write tests to show other instances of this type of bug. The test would have been useless since I used an unsanctioned C compiler, and (due to the nature of the bug) I'm not sure if static analysis would have found the bug anyway.
[1] Test driving the latest Ubuntu Linux installation for development.
[2] The code worked as expected on the business-supported C compilers (it's undefined behavior, anything can happen). Even valgrind didn't catch the error (we were using that at the time) because of the way the code was generated.