Unit tests take too much time to write and are not necessary. Automated test infrastructure is costly to create and maintain. We don’t need a complete approach to quality because it’s expensive. What’s that QA item in the quote? We’ll just have everyone run through it before we release.
Tell that to this company, which got hit with an $8 million bill from the SEC, including a $5 million fine. This was due in part to some complex code that was deleted by a developer that didn’t understand it. Good unit tests should have caught this (and even prevented it in the first place as the test would have served as documentation for the complex code). Automated acceptance tests would have provided a second check and further documentation of the expected behavior. This is pretty extreme, but definitely an example of why quality matters. Even if your company isn’t engaging in millions of dollars of business in a highly regulated environment, there can be real costs to poor quality and the measures to avoid it through a solid automated test strategy really aren’t that hard or expensive in the end.
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