Many years developing games and I saw little benefit in test code but really appreciated the human testers. Now working in automotive and see massive benefit in testing my code and automated running of those tests. What I also see is that in automotive, there's a significant underinvestment in non-automated testing. Humans find weird things.
Without human testing, you're so very often testing that you're right, not testing that you're not wrong. You can only write the tests you can think of.
@fabs I also think human testers should drive/lead/guide automated testing development. This would increase their reach for finding bugs.
@meuns yeah, I tend to do this as a solo dev now. When I play with my code and find a bug, I start writing tests around it to figure out what is wrong. So that's a lot like human tester led automated tests.
I tend to do test first for things that have well defined behaviour in my head, and test after for exploration code.
@JSAMcFarlane @meuns I'm still new to testing, and I can see the attraction of having test cases written in something like user story format. But doesn't this suffer from interpretation rot? The kind of design technical debt you get when people try to mirror the world they're used to in the code? What's your experience with this in practice?
@fabs @JSAMcFarlane I believe testing needs iterations like development and debugging. Rotting tests might just be an hint to iterate on them.