Why I Won’t Write Tests For My Products
I’m making a lot of services alone, such as Inkdrop, but I never write tests because I think it’s time-wasting. I’m talking about the…
I’m making a lot of services alone, such as Inkdrop, but I never write tests because I think it’s time-wasting. I’m talking about the regression testing. It is not usually effective especially for personally developed softwares.
Yes, I know tests are important to ensure the product quality. Needless to say, it’s ideal that you could provide your product without any bugs. As well as tests, there’re tons of things that would help improving it but unfortunately you’ll never have done all of them because your resource is limited. In my case, even worse, I’m working as a freelancer while working my project. So I decided not to have time to write any tests for fostering my product.
Here are reasons in detail.
It Doesn’t Yield Money Yet
What is the purpose of writing tests? The purpose of products is to make a profit. So eliminating bugs by writing tests is just a mean, not a purpose. Tests should be aimed to prevent the opportunity loss and lowering the maintenance costs.
For young products not matured yet it doesn’t make sense that you write tests while it yields not enough money because you don’t have opportunities to loss and don’t have systems that need to be maintained yet.
It will gain more opportunities if you aggressively improve your product while you leave bugs rather than you write tests defensively.
Users Report Issues
It’s nonsense if you broke the core feature, so you always have to have a smoke test before you roll it out every time. Nonetheless you sometimes get bugs but you don’t need to mind that because users could report them.
It’s not a shame approach. This works pretty well, especially when your community is small because you can communicate with them individually. You should respond quickly to bug reports with a top priority and credit them as contributors. Then, users will be happy to be one of contributors of your product.
If your product has no bugs, there are no opportunity losses but also no engagements with users. Bugs could potentially make a chance to get users involved with your product. Like open-source projects, community is easy to grow if it’s imperfect.
Being Alone
“Tester is the first user” — And I’m the first user because I’m making it alone. No one else. That’s good because I can look over it from the codebase to the app concept.
Testers are good at having radical questions like “Is this really the best solution?” Alone developers can have such questions, too. If you are at a team, you would be worried about whether it’s ok to point it out or not, but if alone, it’s all up to you.
Testing is Enviable Problem
That’s why I won’t write tests. It’s not for all type of projects but basically alone developers don’t need to write tests. You will be not able to ignore opportunity losses due to bugs if it succeeded to get many users and to yield money. I would like to be the one who needs to write tests. It’s enviable problem, isn’t it?
