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Comment by Swizec | Hacker News Reader

Now say I have a CTO who doesn’t like (automated) tests be cause he thinks they’re a waste of time and mostly something a type system should do for you (never mind we’re in dynamic loosetyped land). How do I introduce tests? Tried many times, always end up not getting adopted.

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Some options:

- Educate your CTO.

- Just start writing tests. Consider whether you can pull this off.

- Wait for something to go wrong where tests would have caught the problem earlier. That would be a good time to bring testing up again.

- Find another job.

A and C if not done tactfully could lead to D

Do it for yourself - tell the CTO you're doing TDD to make your own process sane. It would be weird for others to object to you adding tests to your own code. Then others will see your awesome code with great coverage and no bugs in PRs and it may even catch on. Convince one or two colleagues to do it with you.

Respectfully I disagree. I’ve found that ‘talking about doing it’ will cause problems if you aren’t able to do it and hold schedule with everything else. From personal experience, for parent post, I’ve found it’s been best to implement what you can for unit tests and grow it yourself slowly or at whatever pace you are comfortable with, but set the bar high for yourself, beat it, and then maybe try to get others on board. This only holds if there is no mentor you could talk into helping you. Just personal experience. :-/ If the culture doesn’t encourage them now, announcing you will be doing it might only hinder the effort.

forgiveness > permission

Oh yeah, go ahead and do TDD to prove to your CTO that he is right.

TDD is a tool for specific needs, just doing TDD because you heard it's great will just kill the team productivity and whatever product they are working on.

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