Testing as a minimum

Published on 3 June 2014.

Yesterday I read a blog post that compared a programmer’s activity to a doctor’s. Apparently doctors didn’t wash their hands in between patients, and when someone concluded that it was a good idea to do so, there was a lot of resistance among doctors to do it. The post then went on to compare washing hands to testing in the software world. There is now resistance among programmers to write test for their code (or for enough of it) even though we know positive things come out of it. Sometime in the future, will programmers see washing their hands as critically important?

I like to write tests. Or rather, I like to have tests written. I find code much more pleasant to work with if I have test that ensure that the code basically works.

But even I skip writing tests sometimes. Using excuses like I just wanna try something real quick, it’s a so small change, I’ll write the code now and test later. But I think the number one reason why I don’t test sometimes is because it’s hard. But if I think about the doctors and their hands, I might try harder.


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