"Why would you waste your time proving that something you wrote works, if you don't have product-market fit, and you need to throw it all out next week to try to satisfy the market with something different?"
Because somewhere around the 3-6 week mark, having decently-tested code means I move faster, not slower.
And to be honest, I'm too effing old anymore to put up with the endless loop of "oh, this change can't break anything -> ship it -> oh crap, that broke like three things -> fix them -> oh crap, that caused a regression over here -> fix it -> oh crap, that fixed that but now this other thing has regressed -> oh crap, this means my entire architecture is wrong which I would have figured out much earlier if I hadn't been so busy putting out fires". I've wondered how much people complaining about burnout is from them living in that loop. I far prefer my tests to tell me about this than my customers.
Yeah, if you're literally bashing together code in one week, to heck with tests. But I think even in the "startup" space that's a minority. Anything that can be solved in a solid month of coding is already commercially available with half-a-dozen plausible open source alternatives anyhow.
Because somewhere around the 3-6 week mark, having decently-tested code means I move faster, not slower.
And to be honest, I'm too effing old anymore to put up with the endless loop of "oh, this change can't break anything -> ship it -> oh crap, that broke like three things -> fix them -> oh crap, that caused a regression over here -> fix it -> oh crap, that fixed that but now this other thing has regressed -> oh crap, this means my entire architecture is wrong which I would have figured out much earlier if I hadn't been so busy putting out fires". I've wondered how much people complaining about burnout is from them living in that loop. I far prefer my tests to tell me about this than my customers.
Yeah, if you're literally bashing together code in one week, to heck with tests. But I think even in the "startup" space that's a minority. Anything that can be solved in a solid month of coding is already commercially available with half-a-dozen plausible open source alternatives anyhow.