Ask HN: Do you write automated tests for your side projects?

Always.

A "side project" is a project, which by definition, doesn't have my full attention. I need to have confidence that I can tweak it and re-deploy it when I have a moment of inspiration or a bug-report.

The main way to be confident that you haven't broken things? Adding test-cases. I started out writing unit-tests for the APIs I present and consume, then later added more tests which run from "Signup, Use the service, Delete the account".

In all honesty I don't run the full suite very often, but when I do I'm glad I took the time to write it.

This really depends on the size of the project and how many developers are involved for me. If it's just me and there are no external users then I almost never write them due to priority. If there are external users and/or at least two developers, then absolutely.

It's a great sign people are writing automated tests for their side projects because based on my experience there are still many teams that aren't bothering to do so for bigger production projects adequately. It's one of those things everyone knows they should do and talk about it but the resources and priorities are almost never in place. The test results need to be visible by more than just the testers too.

I have a particular interest in test automation due to my involvement at Tesults (https://www.tesults.com). This is a test results dashboard for teams of about 10-20 or more - it's not designed for tiny teams or side projects but if you're interested in trying it out for a small team send an email using the address on the site with the link to this page on HN and we can sort you out - only really worth it if you are doing continuous build/integration too, overkill for one or two person teams.

Yes always, I hate it, that's the worst part of every application, testing in general but it's also the foundation for a good night sleep.

Depends on the size and use case of the project. If it's only a small hobby project that myself and a few others use, writing automated tests instead of manual testing is overkill. If you have paying customers or have made an implicit promise to keep the service up and running, then automated tests make sense.

Yes, always. That way I can refactor much faster because I know the tests will catch me.

Never. And then I change platforms, say from heroku to deis. It's is about this time that I wish I at least had some end-to-end tests on the big things like signup, password reset, and profile editing.

Call it post-facto regret I guess.

Some. Not full coverage ever. Partially depends on the language. Statically typed languages come with many free tests called type checking.

Always. If I'm trying to learn something new, I need to write automated tests to check my understanding or else I'll end up getting lost.