Convincing why testing is good
- by FireAphis
Hello,
In my team of real-time-embedded C/C++ developers, most people don't have any culture of testing their code beyond the casual manual sanity checks. I personally strongly believe in advantages of autonomous automatic tests, but when I try to convince I get some reappearing arguments like:
We will spend more time on writing the tests than writing the code.
It takes a lot of effort to maintain the tests.
Our code is spaghetti; no way we can unit-test it.
Our requirement are not sealed – we’ll have to rewrite all the tests every time the requirements are changed.
Now, I'd gladly hear any convincing tips and advises, but what I am really looking for are references to researches, articles, books or serious surveys that show (preferably in numbers) how testing is worth the effort. Something like "We in IBM/Microsoft/Google, surveying 3475 active projects, found out that putting 50% more development time into testing decreased by 75% the time spent on fixing bugs" or "after half a year, the time needed to write code with test was only marginally longer than what used to take without tests".
Any ideas?
P.S.: I'm adding C++ tag too in case someone has a specific experience with convincing this, usually elitist, type of developers :-)
