Being Kind to The Next Guy
It's always good to be kind to the "Next Guy" who has to pick up your code. Writing clean code, and making sure it's readable and understandable is very important, but there's really far more to it than that, and I was reminded about that in Slack this morning, and I wanted to write it down so that I wouldn't forget about it.
When a project gets so large that the tests take more than, say 15 min, to run, often times, a developer will disable the tests because it really gets in the way of making progress. This makes perfect sense. But then you get into a problem that the more you do this, the more likely it is that someone will check in code that fails on one of these disabled tests, and then you have a broken build.
Sure, some will say "That's OK... that's what the CI/CD Pipeline is for." which could be true, until the tests are long enough that multiple people are submitting pull requests and they don't want to wait for the full set of tests to run, and so they move on. But then there's a failure, and another team member has more changes that need to go in, and their tests passed, and so the first developer has to let the other dev go through, and then update their pull request based on the new code, and that's frustrating to them.
So now, developers don't want to add tests, because that just makes the situation worse, and now there's less coverage on the code, and less reliability on the system overall, and it just starts to slide downhill. But there's more... if they are waiting too long for tests, they could be skipping writing good docs or commit messages because they know they have a long wait ahead of them, and they aren't thrilled about that.
Take away good tests, complete tests, and good docs, and now we're really starting to erode the quality of the code - simply because things take too long to be comfortable, and it's perfectly understandable. But we each need to push through that initial response, and work to make the tests faster, and the documentation better, and make sure that the "Next Guy" who works in this code gets the best possible codebase they can have.