Dragan Stepanović

Automated tests as a safety net are most valuable in codebases with high risk when making a change. Those are conflated, coupled codebases where: 1) the average rate of change per element (method/class) is high and 2) the risk of introducing problems with a change is high (too much coupling). The latter is a consequence of the former, and codebases with long methods and classes inherently exhibit these characteristics.

by intentionally not adding integration tests.

the idea of a person with the highest positional power usually wins.

A: “Teams doing XP produce tremendously fewer bugs and have way less rework compared to traditional teams you mostly see in our industry” B: “That’s great, but at what cost?”

“pair/mob programming cannot substitute PR code review process. We still need a fresh pair of eyes to look at the changes” I’d have a million € now.

If, say, product managers are not able to understand those tests, then I’d say they don’t speak domain enough.

and exponentially increasing the risk of something going wrong as you add more functionality is pretty extreme programming compared to TDD if you ask me.

with async code reviews you’ll often get way less feedback and less ability to build in quality than with continuous code reviews (pair/mob programming), but at least you’ll also choke the flow and delay delivery.

Here’s an interesting phenomenon when it comes to the concept of rework in knowledge work. You can only minimize rework, but you cannot eliminate it. If you try to eliminate it, you’ll maximize it.

because they are confident their code works and “tests slow me down”, and then accumulating cruft and things taking ages to implement because they are scared to change the code because there are no tests.