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Comment by Splines | Hacker News Reader

Hey Evan ;)

> We all realize there is no benefit in testing if you ignore failures rather than acting to fix the bugs, but in much the same way that doing nothing when tests fail has no benefit, doing nothing when tests pass also has no benefit - so tests which always pass are just as useless as failing tests you ignore, as are tests which only turn up corner-case bugs that you would have been comfortable with shipping.

On the contrary, my opinion is that we don't see this often enough. Our bug database shows the current list of defects, and there is very very very little data on what does work. What is test covering, and how many defects are they finding within that coverage?

If your bug trend is heading downward, is it because the test org is distracted by something, or because there are fewer bugs that they are encountering?

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Hey Jonathan ;)

This is the danger of having a 'test org' separate from the 'dev org'. When writing tests is tied to writing production code, your progress in one is tied to progress in the other. If it's easy to write tests for a particular feature, then the developer stops writing tests and writes the feature once they're done with the easy tests. It's much easier to understand your coverage when you're actually working with and writing the code being covered, rather than working in some separate "test org" - you don't need to run a coverage tool, you just see what breaks if you comment out a chunk of code. If the answer is "nothing" then it wasn't covered!

At the end of the day, an automated test suite is a product for developers on your project in the same way that a car is a product for drivers. You will have a hard time making a car if nobody on your car-making team can drive, and you will have a hard time writing a test suite as a tool to develop Project Foo if nobody on your test-writing team develops Project Foo.

I now write a project where I handle both the code and the tests. In the same way that my production code is improved by writing tests, my tests are improved by writing production code. I know what is included in the test coverage in the same way that I know what I had for lunch today - because I was there and I remember what happened. Tools for checking coverage are an aid to my understanding; in a company with a separate test org, you don't know anything about coverage until you've run the tool.

> This is the danger of having a 'test org' separate from the 'dev org'.
I completely agree with you, in light of how MSFT categorizes their ICs these days. There used to be three test/dev disciplines when I started (in 2001): "Software Test Engineers", "Software Development Engineers in Test", and "Software Development Engineers" (you likely know this already, but it might be useful history for others to know). Around 8-9 years ago the STE discipline disappeared; the company hired for SDETs (like yourself) from that point on.

The big loss here was that now all STEs were expected to be SDETs - writing code on a regular basis to test the application. There were (notice the past tense) many STEs who knew our application very* very well, and knew how to break it, hard. STEs provided quality feedback at a higher level than what a unit test provides - does the application feel right? Are customers getting their solutions solved? If you have your eyeballs stuck inside a unit test it's difficult to step 30 feet back and ask yourself if you're even doing the right thing.

Nowadays I feel like the pendulum is slowly swinging back the other way, and there is less drive to have test write automation (and maybe it is because where we are in the product cycle). I understand that high-level STEs "back in the day" were probably concerned about potential career progression at the time, which might be why they eliminated STEs (I have no idea of the real reasons - they've been lost to Outlook's mailbox size limits), but all-in-all I think MSFT is poorer because of it.

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