Journey to TDD - Cost of Not Testing

If you found this article and want to start at the beginning, this series starts here.

I had excuses to not test the codebase I inherited. I just kept working around the old code with new features I added.

Not testing my code or even the old codebase caught up to me in the most inconvenient time.

One night during a deploy when users were not expected to use the system, I ran through a quick “smoke test” of the system. I would do a full transaction of the application’s main functionality.

Only then I realized: a feature I added silently took out an old feature of the system.

This feature involved money, not just my friends’ “profit”, but taxes, basically the government’s money.😱

At that moment, options to fix were rushing through my head.