How to fail a technical test

[MicrosoftBob]

For all the tested systems I have worked on I can't honestly say that any of them have gained in any way from testing. Far too much code is written, it is never maintained only added to, what they test is usually code for testing sake rather than testing functionality and very rarely does it actually find a fault that would have went into production that would not have been spotted.

Now we can get into pissing competitions about noddy project but that is my experience working for 15 years on code tested code for clients big and small on projects big and small.

For instance my last project had testing on live user data, if the live user made a change and the DB was copied onto test the Jenkins builds would fail. Now that is an extreme example but that is the kind of stuff I see a lot of.

Really I think we should concentrate on getting people to write code safely and intelligently first before we let them lose with test cases that only give them a false sense of security and another bundle of tulipe code to maintain.

I've seen enough real world examples where regression testing would have maked a product useable rather than become more buggy as each new developer tried to maintain a system

The problem is not testing per se, but people blindly following processes