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> Often I have seen people put a lot of effort into testing things that really doesn't have much payback compared to what they could be testing instead.

Do you have examples of this? What kind of tests do you use and to test what? I've seen people testing _literally everything_ and some only the happy path, failures and critical units like user input/protocol assumptions/algorithms.

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Someone was testing my code and used a Jira plugin (xray) to document all of their "evidence". This gave non technical stakeholders a lot of confidence because the evidence looked so fantastic and neat. My business analyst found a defect and I raised it with the tester as it was relevant to another stream of work the tester had completed earlier. The tester showed that they were unfamiliar with the business requirement relevant to the defect. I dug and prodded the tester a little, only to uncover that the tester felt that referring to my code repository and basically re running my code to compare dataframe row counts, etc was adequate test coverage. Don't be fooled by "evidence".

I see tests like this all the time:

// TestConstructor

Object o = new Object();

assertNotNull(o);

Completely bonkers, but mention it and people just look at you blankly: "....but the test coverage".

Cult-like thinking.

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