Why Are We Writing Tests Again?

Around 6 months ago our team’s test coverage was pretty dismal, hovering somewhere around 0% for most of our front end applications… yeah, we know. The team had recently switched to using ReactJS, was rapidly expanding and fighting against tight deadlines. Testing was the first thing to go. I mean we have a QA team right?

Fast forward to now and our test coverage has skyrocketed to around 20% per application! Writing tests certainly isn’t free. There is a lot of overhead and initial work to get unit and end-to-end tests working. So why do it? What are the actual benefits?

How Does This Work Again?

Most non-trivial applications will have a few places where the logic is complicated and people are apprehensive about making changes. Last time we changed something there the whole app broke they say. Somewhere there is an excel sheet with a list of 10 scenarios you need to test when you make a change… great. Or worse, just ask Sarah how it works, she wrote it 5 years ago 🤷‍♀.

Writing thorough, exhaustive tests for these parts of your app will give you the confidence to refactor. Go ahead and remove that chunk of code with that suspect comment //not sure what this does but it works...

High test coverage frees up your team to experiment and ruthlessly optimize since they know…