Most video games have a full team of QA testers doing functional testing on the games as they go along.
Same thing for the kernel, plus some versions are fully certified for various contexts so you can be sure fully formalised tests suites exists. And that’s on top of all the testing tools which are provided (Kunit, tests from user spaces, an array of dynamic and static testing tools).
But I would like to thank all the people here who think testing is useless for their attitude. You make my job easier while hiring.
> But I would like to thank all the people here who think testing is useless for their attitude. You make my job easier while hiring.
That's fine.
I've never written a test in my life. Have my programs ever had bugs? Sure. But I sleep very well at night knowing that I spent all my brain power and time writing actual code that Does Useful Work rather than have wasted significant lengths of my time on this planet on writing test code to test the code that does the Useful Work.
You speak of attitude and smugly "thank" those who don't write tests as that acts as your hire-or-not filter. With an attitude like that, I'd 100% not work for anyone with that attitude anyway.
> I've never written a test in my life. Have my programs ever had bugs? Sure. But I sleep very well at night knowing that I spent all my brain power and time writing actual code that Does Useful Work rather than have wasted significant lengths of my time on this planet on writing test code to test the code that does the Useful Work.
And that’s why I never want to have to work with you on anything shipping to a user ever.
Don’t get me wrong, the field is riddled with people who think testing is beside them and wash their hand with the quality of what they ship and what they put their users through. That’s an issue to fix not a situation we should tolerate.
> Don’t get me wrong, the field is riddled with people who think testing is beside them and wash their hand with the quality of what they ship and what they put their users through. That’s an issue to fix not a situation we should tolerate.
See, this is my point. It's not that testing is beside me, it's that my stuff gets tested anyway.
Here's the test: Does it fucking work or not?
You do that by running the thing. If it explodes, find out why and fix it. Job done. No thought or line of code was wasted in writing tests, all brain power was used to initially write a piece of code - which initially had a bug of course - and then said bug was fixed.
My code gets tested. By people using it. Or by me testing it as I write it ("does it fucking work").
There is really only one test.
You can choose to expend your brainpower and time on this planet writing code that will never actually be run by an end-user, or you can just write the fucking code that the end-user will run. That's how I work. Write it and run it. That's the test.
Test code written to test Useful Working Code is time wasted. It's like putting stabiliser wheels on bicycles - you're either gonna be stuck forever riding a bike with stabilisers, or you grow up and rip them off and have a few falls on the bike then become confident and competent enough to ride that bike without them. And have more freedom and time to experiment and go places you couldn't when they were put on.
So yeah. I definitely wouldn't work with people who like wasting my and their time on this Earth.
Write it. Run it. It either does what it's supposed to or not. If it doesn't, find out why and fix it. Or discover that your function/code abstraction/thought was shit in the first place then write it differently - oh and that's the worst part about writing code that tests the Code That Does The Work; say you discover that the function you're writing was a load of bollocks and needs to be highlighted and simply erased - there goes all that test code you spent brainpower and time, with it, too. And now you have to spend even more time writing new test code to test the Code That Actually Does Useful Work.
> Write it. Run it. It either does what it's supposed to or not. If it doesn't, find out why and fix it
That's called functional testing and that's actually testing. You are one step removed from actually formalising what you do and getting non regression testing for free. At that point, I think you are either arguing fot the sake of it and do actually realise that testing is important or somehow confuse testing with unit testing which is only a narrow subset of it.
Congratulations. I already told you I test my programs. The discussion is about expending brain power and time writing hundreds of lines of code to test the intended user-facing code, which, in my opinion, is just dumber than a bag of hammers.
I think we're talking specifically test automation like unit tests, integration tests, and end to end tests. You can't write software without ever trying to run it, which is functional testing. A solo developer e.g. has to be doing these sorts of "QA"/functional manual testing.
How many _test files do you see? Millions of people played Doom for endless hours and the quality beats a lot of modern software with tests.
Again, tests certainly have their place in modern software development, but the kind of thinking that if you have tests that means your quality is good is wrong and actually leads to worse software quality. Tests are just a part of an overall approach to quality software.
EDIT: Re hiring. I would be looking for people that understand the nuances and the why vs. people that approach things through a religious lens. I.e. they understand the tradeoffs. If you're writing tests then your tests are code. Should you write tests for your tests? If not why not? How do you know that your tests are correct? If your religion says 100% unit test coverage for all code then it's pretty clear this is a religious belief not subject to reason (because otherwise you'd be also asking for 100% coverage for your unit test code by other unit tests).
There are situations where unit tests have a ton of leverage. There are situations where they have less. Testing happens in other disciplines, e.g. mechanical engineering, where certain things get tested (including with automation) and others do not. The decisions depend on the function of the component, the impact of failure, preexisting knowledge about the technologies, etc. software engineering can learn something from some of those other engineering disciplines...
Same thing for the kernel, plus some versions are fully certified for various contexts so you can be sure fully formalised tests suites exists. And that’s on top of all the testing tools which are provided (Kunit, tests from user spaces, an array of dynamic and static testing tools).
But I would like to thank all the people here who think testing is useless for their attitude. You make my job easier while hiring.