DenkzeitWiki

Win Your Boss For Automated Tests

• We don't write tests. There just isn't time for luxuries.

Everybody has to test their code. It's just that those of us who write automated tests write code to do our testing, where non-testers use humans (themselves, usually) to manually verify correct behavior. So, we can be sure that the testing-slows-us-down argument rests on the premise that manually verifying behavior is faster than writing automated tests.

If it takes twenty minutes to write your automated tests, and one minute to test your feature manually, the break even point for an automated tester is when they've run their tests twenty times. After that point, automated tests become cheaper and cheaper (per test). Manual tests continue to become increasingly expensive over their lifetime.