Told some Devs today, "I've given you information on how to start testing. Java is easy to test. I've explained why it's important. Now, if the next change you make isn't tested, that's a choice. If you make that choice, please consider other places of employment."

So tired of lazy.

Good attitude as long as you give them enough time to write code and test it.

@nickpapoutsis It's a false time savings to skip the tests.

@yamatoman Generally agree but if you have the deadline for next morning you will cut every corner you can and deal with it later.

@nickpapoutsis I've been doing this coding thing for 21 years. People always look for reasons not to do it correctly. You can't safely slam in a fix in the middle of the night into code that doesn't have tests.
If we're facing a deadline like that other than for an emergency production outage, there are bigger issues to discuss.

@yamatoman I completely agree with you here.

I get ur point, but I'd suggest trying to understand y they rn't writing tests rather than just attributing it to laziness. Are they generally lazy or are they good devs but just dont like writing tests?

If it's the latter it might be solvable. Unit tests can be boring and dull/repetitive to write. U might develop some common libraries to minimize the repetition and maybe make sure they know about things like parametrized tests and test data sources etc if ur test framework supports them. Maybe also try to get someone who didnt write the code to write the tests for it, it can work as a kind of code review/knowledge sharing, and might be less boring..

@xalez as someone who also is responsible for delivering tested code, no.

We don't pay them to deploy breaking changes that require hours of downtime and business impact. We pay them for quality. If they now have the knowledge of what quality looks like and do not work to pursue it, then we should stop paying them. Our job is not to make our job easy or less boring. That's what hobbies are for. Our job is to deliver value to the business rapidly, safely, and as inexpensively as possible. That means full test suites. That means unit, component, and contract tests in place for every push to version control. That means focus on test design as a primary deliverable to enable Continuous Delivery.

So, no, I don't care if it's boring. It's my bonus they are burning. They can shape up and stop looking shocked that they need to test their code or leave.

As an aside, external testing after the fact doesn't work. Test FIRST.

@yamatoman I disagree with a lot of what u're saying .. but good luck anyways

@xalez well, fortunately for me, I'm in a position to drive us towards better outcomes and most of the high performing devs at my company agree with me. The rest, well, there are other places who don't know better. :)

@yamatoman good luck comrade