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Comment by rtpg | Hacker News Reader

I'm shocked that there are places in 2024 that have a separate set of devs writing test code. What decade is this?

Having one set of developers write the code and another set of developers write tests from the same specification without reading the code is probably the most effective ways to use tests for high software quality and is typically required by certification bodies e.g. for avionics.

That’s a good point for things with certain kinds of specs, but it seems a hell of a lot more straightforward for the person who is writing an implementation to also be in a testing mindset (if only to be writing testable code)

Perhaps people in these environments are made of different stuff but touching both sides feels almost essential to me.

Having a separate test team is pretty much mandatory in safety critical development. You really want people who haven’t written the code go through the specification independently and write test cases for every requirement.

The (unit) tests developers write themselves check the developer did what they intended to, and then that things don't change. Whatever case analysis the developer missed in the implementation tends to be missing from their tests as well, as they didn't think of it.

Testing your own work also does nothing to protect against correctly implementing the wrong thing.

This is a fair point. I imagine in a stricter environment you could (for example) have tests before implementations even to avoid huge feedback loops

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