How would you define 'Confidence' in testing? (Unit / Integration / E2E / Whatever)
As titled. Most people claim that the purpose of testing is to maintain / improve 'confidence'. But...confidence in what exactly? I have some thoughts but would be good to get some other opinions. I'm not in huge agreement with Theo's general take, but him being much smarter and more experienced in this stuff than me, it would be interesting to understand why he (and others) seem to avoid testing as a rule, particularly unit testing.
2 Replies
to me, the confidence that tests bring is in the form of knowing that your changes won't break some pre-existing feature (which is checked by a test)
I would agree in general I think, it's about future-proofing your work. So it seems like there's two parts to most dev work: the actual work, which is for 'now', and then a bit of work for future developers to help them out and ensure they haven't broken your stuff with their stuff.