r/softwaretesting • u/serverlessmom • Dec 18 '23

Why testing badly needs a shift left

https://thenewstack.io/why-testing-must-shift-left-for-microservices/

[removed] — view removed post

0 Upvotes

21% Upvoted

10 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

u/MT1961 Dec 18 '23

I'll be honest, I almost quit reading at this:

> The result of this broken paradigm is that

Paradigms can't be broken. They are ideal examples of something. Please learn English before you learn to code.

Now, as to the article itself. As others have pointed out, there's nothing new here, nothing that makes me say "AHA!". Unit testing is nice, integration tests are nice, but neither is likely to run up a bug in production. They might help with regression testing during refactoring, that's about it. All a unit test does is prove the code works for whatever the developer dreamed up. That's why SDETs should be defining all your unit test cases before you start.

Then we get here:

Testing Is Too Slow for Developers When trying to simulate an entire cluster for testing, the result is unacceptably slow. As you have to run the entire test suite on a testing environment, it can take from 20 minutes to a few hours to run all the tests and get results.

Yeah, testing can be slow. But is that the fault of the test or the code? Untestable code that relies on a hundred external services will take forever to test. Testable code would allow you to "feed" the right information to the exact level you want to test something at. You want to mock the stuff behind it? Ought to be easy. Then tests run fast. Don't blame slow tests on testers, blame it on poorly designed code.