What holds you back?

| Programming

Today I received an interesting email from someone trying to sell an online tutorial on WebdriverIO which posed the following:

"Quick question: What holds you back from writing automated tests?"

Based on my personal experience doing various projects in the wonderful world of software development, here is a list of reasons with which I replied:

  • The product is already finished and in production so there's no more budget left for automated testing.
  • The platform is legacy software and no one understands how it works.
  • We already have an army of functional testers in India who are manually testing everything, and it's cheap.
  • You need "technical" people to setup the the automated test environment, and the only technical people we have are developers and system admins.
  • Developers hate to write tests and have no time to learn it.
  • Most testers are high-level black-box functional testers and are not concerned with the internal details nor are technical enough to understand the underlying software.
  • Setting up an automated environment is expensive.
  • There are already tons of tests failing and no one gives a damn.
  • The CI runs from Jenkins and the guy that set things up is no longer working for us (don't fix whats not broken).
  • Managers do not fully understand what automated testing is and how it really works and are therefore unwilling to invest money.
  • Automated testing means that the functionality of the complete product is known, however mostly it is undocumented or specific areas of expertise limited to certain privileged individuals.
  • We're too busy and have no time.
  • Good testers are hard to find, especially those that are technically inclined and/or understand how to write software.
  • The product is not stable and is changing too frequently, meaning that time spent invested in writing test scripts that will continuously break is not worth it.

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This personal weblog was started way back on July 21, 2001 which means that it is 7-21-2001 old.

So far this blog contains no less than 2498 entries and as many as 1877 comments.

Important events

Graduated from Stanford 6-5-1979 ago.

Kiffin Rockwell was shot down and killed 9-23-1916 ago.

Believe it or not but I am 10-11-1957 young.

First met Thea in Balestrand, Norway 6-14-1980 ago.

Began well-balanced and healthy life style 1-8-2013 ago.

My father passed away 10-20-2000 ago.

My mother passed away 3-27-2018 ago.

Started Gishtech 04-25-2016 ago.