Alicia Sedlock, on removing a large section of a website:
… it’s the ultimate “I really hope this doesn’t break something else” situation. It was a stressful and tedious effort of triple checking that the things we were removing weren’t dependencies elsewhere. To be honest, we wouldn’t have been able to do this with any amount of success or confidence without our test suite.
Tests don’t just help you when you change code or write new code, then help when you remove it, too. Seems to me testing has settled into the industry mindset as crucially important. As the year closes, I imagine managers worldwide are considering employees ability to write tests in their reviews.
This also reminds me of our unending quest to define “front-end development”, a job description with skill requirements that get broader and broader every day. Testing is a unique skillset with its own learning curve. But if JavaScript is squarely in the front-end bucket, shouldn’t testing that JavaScript also be?
This is also your yearly reminder that 24 ways has kicked off.