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Comment by nottorp | Hacker News Reader

Well, Agile also used to make sense before it was called Agile and turned into a set of rituals.

Same for unit tests and any other practical matters that have turned into religion.

Plus there's the little matter that you tend to think that your application is tested if it has automated tests. Then your colleague in sales who clicks like he's having an epileptic episode comes over and your app crashes 3 different times [1].

[1] True story. I used to ask him to click 2 min on whatever I was working on when he passed by my desk.

[2] PalmOS had the gremlins tool. To my knowledge no other platform has it.

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> Well, Agile also used to make sense before it was called Agile and turned into a set of rituals.

If you want to make sense of "Agile" read "The Agile manifesto" (1), it's not long even with the 2nd page (2).

but yes, the modern criticisms of modern "agile" are pretty much the same as the problems that caused that agile movement in the first place. And are starkly at odds with the Agile Manifesto, e.g. "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools" and "Responding to change over following a plan" vs "Our tool, Jira, enables micromanagement of human resources over a long-term plan"

1) https://agilemanifesto.org/

2) https://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html

> If you want to make sense of "Agile" read "The Agile manifesto"

Yeah, too bad modern Agile doesn't have much to do with the original manifesto...

Yep one tester I know had as his first tests

Hit multiple keys on the keyborard at once and do that for a few seconds.

Then if it p[assed that he would get down to more structured testing.

Testers have to assume the user is an idiot and also will always do the wrong thing.

Testers have value.

But that value is not in yet again, before each release, taking a day to run through an excel spreadsheet of checks that should have been long ago automated into a 2-minute run.

Agreed on more automation.

But some tests will take time to run so a day turn round is a quick turnround.

If you have databases involved it will not be a 2 minute run - the network latency will make the queries take time. Note these need to be run as integration tests so mocking is not sufficient.

2 minutes is an eternity in database time. You should be able to run dozens of test cases in that amount of time unless your app is just monstrously slow.

The time in the database is low. The time is the time transferring data over the network and the limiting factor is the number of individual transactions. A result processing one record does have similar speed to one looking at 1000 records.

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