Coming up to Speed

Continual vigilance

Learning a new practice like unit testing requires continual vigilance. Even if you enjoy writing unit tests and are good about covering new code , you’re usually facing an uphill battle.

Perhaps our teammates are not as vigilant and are slamming out code at a rate that far outpaces our testing, or perhaps we’re close to a critical deadline and our team insists that the only way to make the deadline is to toss all safeguards.

Crunch mode and teammates

“Unit testing isn’t free,” a coworker might say, “We’re supposed to deliver in two weeks, and we’re way behind. We just need to slam out some code.”