

Testing is Bullshit - a manifesto - pbiggar
https://circleci.com/blog/testing-is-bullshit/

======
simonsarris
As a viewer, I generously read all six paragraphs.

And I learned nothing about the product.

~~~

If you're going to spend six paragraphs making claims, which is in my opinion
a dangerous thing to do[1], you better have the user saying "yeah!" in their
head successively louder as each paragraph goes by, because you're delaying
the part where you actually tell the user about the product. But this page
doesn't really say anything about the product.

[1] Making one claim after another is dangerous because it gives you a chance
to say something stupid or disagreeable. For instance their claim:

> I’ll wager that Facebookers spend 50% of their times on tests, time which
> could – in an ideal world – be spent on product.

Serves to make them look a bit ridiculous. If the product is a polished app
then _spending time on tests is spending time on the product._ It seems silly
to suggest otherwise.

Stop claiming things and tell me what your damn product does. If I have to
look it up what it does I'll probably find a list of competitors alongside it.

(edit: which is exactly what wikipedia shows
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_integration#Software>)

~~~
pbiggar
Good point. We didn't want to make this a sales pitch - we wanted to make it a
call to action about the state of testing. But I can see how pitching the
product would help. So here goes:

\- incredibly easy to set up, you'll probably have your tests running in one
click

\- very fast - our users report tests run faster than on their own machines

\- Supports parallelism - you can reduce your test times by up to about 7x.

------
augustl
> Testing doesn’t really help our customers. At best it helps indirectly, in
> the same way that HR or payroll or marketing does.

I agree with this, but I think this applies to source code in general, not
just tests. Software is different from many other crafts in that there's a
strong separation between construct and artifact. The metaphor would be that
the house you live in is actually an artifact/result of a different house
somewhere else, that you might or might not have access to, and changes to the
house you live in requires change to the "source" house. And the source house
looks nothing like the actual house. As Rich Hickey puts it, users of your
software rarely gets to look at the source code and be satisfied with how
pleasant it is (or isn't).

~~~
pbiggar
Nice perspective. I feel at least source code is directly related to what
users experience. Testing feels like it takes away from it.

------
michaelfeathers
Link bait is Bullshit - a comment

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xyzzyb
Mmm, a title tailor-made for the HN frontpage but disappointingly lacking in
content.

It's just a thin layer on top of a call to action for this new CI service. The
service itself may be awesome but I didn't learn anything about it from this.

------
dbecker
I read both the "manifesto" and the docs.

Still not sure exactly how they are improving testing. As far as I can tell,
it's just running tests on their machines instead of mine.

It integrates with GitHub, and they've done something-or-other to facilitate
parallelism. None of this tells me why it might be a useful service.

~~~
pbiggar
This is step 1: a vastly easier-to-use and faster continuous integration
server than you currently have (if you have one). The manifesto talks more
about where we're going - we want to be the dev tools for your company.

