Is the development of automated tests a waste of time for a startup?

Re:Is the development of automated tests a waste of time for... by nmeans on Wednesday June 13, 2007 @05:07PM (#27887)

If you have humans writing code for you, tests are an imperative. Without tests, one seemingly small code error can wipe out a smatter of user-created data accidentally. Sure, it's worse case, but it could also mean lights out for your startup. You have to decide if it's worth the risk.

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Re:Is the development of automated tests a waste of time for... by richcollins on Wednesday June 13, 2007 @05:17PM (#27897)

Shouldn't you be backing this kind of data up? You can't guarantee that tests will catch this anyway.

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Re:Is the development of automated tests a waste of time for... by nmeans on Wednesday June 13, 2007 @05:23PM (#27901)

If you've got good coverage, you'll have a great chance that they will. You've got to actively monitor your coverage though.

As far as backups go, a backup is only as good as it's age. If a startup is struggling to decide if they've got the resources for writing tests, they probably don't have the resources for maintaining a real-time database mirror either. You can argue that you should always back up before you roll out a code update, but the real world's not always like that.

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Re:Is the development of automated tests a waste of time for... by mdakin on Wednesday June 13, 2007 @06:23PM (#27920)

If one is using Postgres as the DB it is not really necessary to set up a real-time database mirror to have a very robust error recovery strategy. (I can't speak about MySQL but there is probably a similar feature.)

All you need to do is configure the Point In Time Recovery feature, write a little backup script (mine is 165 lines of Python), and then call it from cron.

With PITR as long as you have the last backup and the archived WAL files made since the last backup you can recover to the SECOND before your program puked all over the DB.

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Re:Is the development of automated tests a waste of time for... by brlewis on Thursday June 14, 2007 @08:43AM (#28063)

On ourdoings.com I've only ever had one error that could wipe out user-created data, and it would not have been caught by unit testing.

On the other hand, if I knew of a great tool for automated page tests I would use it. I don't think creation of such tests should be hard.

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