20 months, 2K hours, 200K € lost. A story about resilience and sunk cost fallacy

Re:20 months, 2K hours, 200K € lost. A story about resilienc... by marcus_holmes on Monday January 04, 2021 @05:50AM (#25629711)

This is what I don't get - a test suite saves me time. So, yes, it is free to create and maintain. Because it's much quicker to find regression bugs with automated testing than with manual testing. And this is massively more valuable when things are changing rapidly.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:20 months, 2K hours, 200K € lost. A story about resilienc... by dstick on Monday January 04, 2021 @08:17AM (#25630910)

I think the core of what they're trying to get at is: let the users find those bugs. The business isn't large enough to focus on details, yet. In the future, when fixing bugs takes more time than making features, you should have the money to hire more hands and focus more on testing. If you don't, then you built too much product for too little clients which is a problem in and of itself ;-)

The cost/benefit isn't there in the beginning. All the bugs are either obvious, easy to find, or quickly discovered without a test suite. So save the time writing tests to stamp out more features the customer wants!

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:20 months, 2K hours, 200K € lost. A story about resilienc... by marcus_holmes on Monday January 04, 2021 @12:06PM (#25634234)

Adding features adds complexity. Features interact with each other in complex ways. If you add a feature and don't know quickly if it broke another feature, that costs time.

Letting the users find the bugs costs time - you have to talk to the user, replicate the bug report, find the failure, fix it, and then release. Finding that same bug 2 minutes after you wrote it (and before it got released) is massively quicker.

This feels like one of those "write code 16 hours a day to make more progress!" things that experience has taught me just doesn't work in practice. I feel like I'm making a lot of progress, but after about 10 hours most of the code I write is pure shite and needs to be rewritten the next day. I've found that it's actually way faster to quit coding after 8-10 hours rather than spend 2 hours the next day rewriting everything I wrote in the last 6 hours the day before.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:20 months, 2K hours, 200K € lost. A story about resilienc... by burnthrow on Monday January 04, 2021 @12:52PM (#25635141)

> finding that same bug 2 minutes after you wrote it (and before it got released) is massively quicker.

That's not realistic.

Your last paragraph about overwork seems unrelated to TDD dogma.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:20 months, 2K hours, 200K € lost. A story about resilienc... by marcus_holmes on Monday January 04, 2021 @04:17PM (#25638193)

That's because I was relating my personal experience building MVPs rather than spouting TDD dogma.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:20 months, 2K hours, 200K € lost. A story about resilienc... by imtringued on Tuesday January 05, 2021 @05:57AM (#25644210)

Tests cost money up front. Can you pay for those tests? You said you will pay for it in decreased costs once the business is running well.

Ok but how confident are you that your business will work out?

1%? you just increased your project costs 100 fold by doing tests.

50%? you just doubled your project costs by doing tests.

100%? Ok you are saving money, but if you are that confident then why haven't you gotten investors aboard that are convinced that doing it well from the start is a business edge?

[ Parent | on HN ]