Stop Over-Relying on your Beautifully Elegant Automated Tests
Time and again, I find developers (including myself) over-relying on our automated tests. esp. unit tests which run fast and reliably.
In the urge to save time today, we want to automate everything (which is good), but then we become blindfolded to this desire. Only later to realize that we’ve spent a lot more time debugging issues that our automated tests did not catch (leave the embarrassment caused because of this aside.)
I’ve come to believe:
A little bit of manual, sanity testing by the developer before checking in code can save hours of debugging and embarrassment.
Again this is contextual and needs personal judgement based on the nature of the change one makes to the code.
In addition to quickly doing some manual, sanity test on your machine before checking, it can be extremely important to do some exploratory testing as well. However, not always we can test things locally. In those cases, we can test them on a staging environment or on a live server. But its important for you to discover the issue much before your users encounter it.
P.S: Recently we faced Error CS0234: The type or namespace name ‘Specialized’ does not exist in the namespace ‘System.Collections’ issue, which prompted me to write this blog post.
