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That is really cool that you began that dialogue!

Even though this is far from unit tests, were you allowed to suggest anything like Selenium? which would allow you to at least test the business facing functional points so that you could be sure that a release wouldn't break what the business person sees.

Just wondering if he is 100% against tests in all scenarios!

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Selenium needs quite a bit more overhead than the unit test I'd be doing, so I think it's even less unlikely.

He is certainly not ideology against tests by any means, it's just he doesn't believe the trade off would be worth it (test writing time and debug vs time spend directly on development). My guess the answer would be along the line of "we're lacking resources"

One approach is to start documenting how much of your time is spent either a) manually testing changes because you have no automated tests b) debugging, fixing bugs, and patching messed up data due to bugs that easily could have been caught by tests. I find that investing in basic acceptance tests pays itself off very quickly. Good tests allow you to iterate on your early product much faster, because you can actually make changes without breaking things for your early users. If you can document the wasted time, maybe you can convince him of the benefit.

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