Tests are how you ship fast.
If you have good tests in place you can ship a new feature without fear that it will break some other feature that you haven't manually tested yet.
It wasn't too long ago that I wrote tests for something that was shipped years ago without any automated tests. Figured it was easier doing that than hoping we won't break it.
Your tests pay for themselves the moment you want to ship a second feature without fear of breaking the first.
But one thing that used to be a common design anti-pattern was the "version 2 problem". I think I first heard about it when Netscape were talking about how NN2 was a disaster, and they were finally happy with NN3 or NN4.
Often version 1 is a hastily thrown together mess of stuff, but it works and people like it. But there's lots of bad design decisions and you reach a limit with how far you can continue pushing that bad design before it gets too brittle to change. So you start on version 2, a complete rewrite to fix all the problems and you end up with something that's "technically perfect" but so overengineered, it's slow and everybody hates it, plus there are probably lots of workflow hoops to jump through to get things approved that you end up not making any progress, and possibly version 2 kills the product and/or the company.
The idea is that the "version 3" is a pragmatic compromise - the worse design problems from version 1 are gone, but you forego all the unnecessary stuff that you added in version 2, and finally have a product that customers like again (assuming you can convince them to come back and try v3 out) and you can build into future versions.
To a large degree I think this "version 2 problem" was a by product of waterfall design, it's certainly been less common since agile development became popular in the early 2000s and tooling made large scale refactoring easier, but even so I remember working somewhere with a v1 that the customers were using and a v2 that was a 3-year rewrite going on in parallel. None of the developers wanted to work on v1 even though that's what brought in the revenue, and v2 didn't have any of the benefit of the bug fixes accumulated over the years to fix very specific issues that were never captured in any of the scope documents.
- Fred Brooks, 'The Mythical Man Month' (1975)
I think our industry would do a lot to take a moment and breath to understand what we have collectively done since inception. Wonder often if we will look at the highly corporatized influence our industry has had during our time as the dark ages 1000s of years into the future. The idea that private enterprise should shape the direction of our industry is deeply problematic, there needs to be public option and I doubt many devs would disagree.
As I rewrote it, I started pulling in more "nice to haves" or else opening up the design for the potential to support more and more future features. I eventually got to a point where it became unwieldy as it had too many open-ended architectural decisions and a lot of bloat.
I ended up scrapping this v2 before releasing it and worked on a v3 but with a more focused architecture, having some things open-ended but choosing not to pursue them yet as I knew that would just introduce unneeded bloat.
I was quite aware of the second-system effect when doing all this, but I still succumbed to it. Thankfully, the v3 rewrite didn't take as long since I was able to incorporate a lot of the v2 design decisions but scaled some of them back.
Usually levied at people who are so hyper focused on shipping a so-called MVP that is really demoware that they are driving us at a brick wall and commenting the entire way about what good time we are making.
We never did a full v3 rewrite, but it took about 4 years and many v3 redesigns of various features to get our legacy customers on board.
I feel like we keep having to reestablish known facts every two years in this field.
If you are a two man startup, burning through runway and pre-product-market fit... then spending a lot of time on tests is questionable (although the cost-benefit now with AI is changing very fast).
What I find "insane", "dogmatic"... about your comment is the complete elision of this process of cost-benefit analysis, as if there should never be such an analysis.
I've worked with a lot of people like you. When a discussion begins about a choice to be made, they just stampede in with "THIS IS THE RIGHT WAY". And the discussion can't even be had.
This sort of "dogmatism" is so rife if engineering culture, I wonder if this is why the c-suite is so ready to dump us all for AI centaurs that just fucking ship features. How many of them got burned listening to engineers who refused to perform even the most basic of cost benefit analyses with the perspective of the business as a whole in mind and forced the most unnecessary, over-engineered bullshit.
I worked at one startup where the tech lead browbeat the founders into building this enormous microservice monster that took them years. They had ONE dev team, ONE customer, and the only feature actually being used was just a single form (which was built so badly it took seconds to type a single character in a field cause the React re-renders were crazy).
Now THAT's insanity.
That's exactly what this person is railing against. They strictly forbid testing.
And I still feel the original comment doesn't give this point enough weight.
When it stopped being two people he still forbade tests. In this decade. That is fucking nuts.
Fun fact: the guy I worked a 2 man project with and I had a rock solid build cycle, and when we got cancelled to put more wood behind fewer arrows, he and I built the entire CI pipeline. On cruisecontrol. And if you don’t know what that is, that is Stone Age CI. Literal sticks and rocks. Was I ahead of a very big curve? You bet your sweet bippy. But that was more than twenty years ago.
That may have been spectactular naivete but it's not insanity.
The point I keep coming back to here that everyone is fighting me so hard on is that these blanket statements of: NO TESTS IS NUTS... absent of an understanding of the business context... is harmful.
I think the author could have been happier with the no-test decision if they had treated the initial work as a prototype with the idea of throwing it away.
At the same time, writing some tests, should not be seen as a waste of time since if you're even at all experienced with it, it's going to be faster than constantly reloading your browser or pressing up-up-up-up-up in a REPL to check progress (if you're doing the latter you are essentially doing a form of sorta reverse TDD).
So I dunno... I may be more in line with the idea that's a bit insane to prevent people from writing tests BUT so many people are so bad at writing tests that ya, for a go-gettem start up it could be the right call.
I certainly agree with your whole cost-benefit analysis paragraph.
There is no ability here for the cost benefit analysis to change over time. There is only no tests
I'd still push back on your hyperbole though. I don't think the author was insane - and we don't know what the broader business context was when they started growing the team and decided to persist without building out the test architecture at that point. They made a call that dogfooding was going to be enough to catch issues as they grew the team. There are a lot of scenarios where that is going to be true.
One scenario where it wouldn't - the most likely - is that the team isn't actually dogfooding because they personally don't find the product useful. Leadership lambasts them to use the product more... but no one does cause it sucks so much it impacts their own personal productivity.
Even there I wouldn't use the word insane... just poor leadership.
I did not.
What we really don't need is paragraphs of someone arguing because their own definitions differ slightly from the OP
He edited his reply to me multiple times... which is what made me suspect an edit to the original comment. But whatever, I'm happy to acknowledge his original intent even if he did state it more harshly.
>What we really don't need is paragraphs of someone arguing because their own definitions differ slightly from the OP
This is unnecessary. OP came out with "AUTHOR IS INSANE" even on the most generous of interpretations. Even if we allow for nuance OP is claiming, there is little constructive about his contribution. I feel fine about calling it out.
I got the sense from your reply that some extra clarity would be beneficial.
> This is unnecessary. OP came out with "AUTHOR IS INSANE" even on the most generous of interpretations.
I did not actually call the author insane, I called their decision to explicitly disallow testing insane. It's an insane decision. I am not _literally_ calling the author insane.
The justification for K8s seems pretty thin. It makes me wonder if the author understands why they need it. I'm guessing it's because they've got substantial parallel, multi-tenant networking of stateful processes, which is a pretty defensible reason to use K8s. And easy to say. It seems strange to leave it out.
The argument against Temporal also seems invalid, but I'm not certain. It has been years since I used it, but wouldn't it be possible to poll for completion? It seems like you'd wind up with better observability/retryability tooling, and it's much simpler overall. Polling seems like a good compromise for what I'd consider much easier tooling to reason about.
I'd also posit that you could model a lot of this using your own serializable state machines. They're in the JS ecosystem, so XState is an excellent option. You'd get incredible visibility into your orchestration, deep access to testing the semantics and logic you care most about, and the ability to have your entire architecture be containers on the fly with no blackbox orchestration.
Of course, I'm speculating after browsing through their website a bit and thinking about the problems they described. I'm missing a lot of context. K8s could be the clear winner.
Still, after reading this I would never use this product. I don't mean to sound unkind. I'd never trust the decision-making of the people who followed this trajectory. If I were the author I'd take this down ASAP.
> I would NOT allow people to write tests
> now [...] we started with tests from the ground up
> but tests make a whole lot more sense when you know what you're building.
It's very true. This is a "gotcha" a lot of anti-TDDers always bring up, and yet some talk about "prototyping == good" without ever making the connection that you can do both.
Sometimes your code is "just" a proof of concept, a way to test the idea. Very far from a decent product.
That is the time you ditch the code, keep the ideas (both good and bad) and start over.
Wildly swinging dogmatism on how to do software development that’s so wrong you have to throw it all away - then repeating this failure loop multiple times.
Doesn’t inspire any confidence in the person I wouldn’t get them to lead a project.
Why would you be so loud and proud about all this.
Especially wild considering their product is literally an automated bug finder lol.
This whole business is a fashion industry.
I'm for one grateful for LLMs because for the first time in around 30 years there is actually genuine novelty to explore in software engineering. Ruby and nodejs weren't it.
MVC really changed web dev for the better, and Django/Rails trail-blazed it. It's one of the few paradigms I've seen in my career that was an unequivocal win for us.