We are in a very funny situation where I just spent two weeks fixing FE bugs and there are so many left. I asked to add integration tests but the answer was “no”, cause we can’t test the UI and all of that.
So the proposed solution was to be more careful, except I’m careful but testing whole website parts or the whole website is not feasible. What can I do?
Tests are about building confidence that code changes are safe. Having good test coverage frees developers from having to worry about unknowns, an activity that is time consuming and distracts from the goals of the ticket being worked on. The phrase “be careful” is nearly directly opposite to good test coverage. “Be careful” says “worry about breaking things because we don’t have high confidence when we make code changes.” That is a huge signal that test coverage should be increased. And what effort would that take? Take a sprint or just a day or two in the next few sprints to focus on writing tests.
Real world annecdata: one of our biggest customers, a global megacorp, said they no longer worry about upgrading our software because it no longer fails in unpredictable ways like it used to. Do you know why our customers now have that confidence? Because we deliberately focused on increasing test coverage. Increasing test coverage is helping us secure high value deals that our sales team spent a lot of time and effort winning.
Testing is important enough that I would inflate my ticket estimates as much as needed to gain ground there. Also, put a CI check for coverage percentage that fails when coverage percentage decreases.