Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by aswihart 795 days ago
Figuring out whether the upgrade is safe is a hard problem. I've found renovate most successful in frontend JS projects where you have a ton of dependencies all with new versions coming out all the time, most of which are non-breaking, and where the danger of a bad upgrade is not that large.

For backend work or once you've gotten the easy stuff out of the way you really need to review the changelog, assess the risk, and do the upgrade safely (disclosure: my startup Infield is in this space).
2 comments
jml78 795 days ago
At my company, I feel just the opposite. Our frontend JS projects are lacking in enough unit, integration, and e2e that most of those devs are scared to touch any dependencies.

Where on our backends, we have such high code coverage, quality integration tests, the backend devs are never nervous about updating dependencies.

EDIT: I will also say, we are purely microservices so that does help in this regard.

link
esafak 795 days ago
You need to write tests against your libraries, not just your own code!
link