Parting Thoughts

Testing isn’t glamorous, but it’s what separates professional software from hobby projects. The techniques in this guide help you catch bugs before your users do.

Key Takeaways

Start Simple: Basic unit tests catch most bugs. Don’t jump to complex testing strategies until you need them.

Test What Matters: Focus on business logic, edge cases, and integration points. Don’t test trivial getters and setters.

Benchmark Early: Performance problems are easier to fix when you catch them early. Set up benchmarks for critical paths.

Automate Everything: Manual testing doesn’t scale. Automate tests, benchmarks, and quality checks in your CI pipeline.

Testing Is a Skill

Good testing requires practice. You’ll write bad tests at first - tests that are brittle, slow, or don’t catch real bugs. That’s normal.

Learn from production failures. When something breaks, ask: “How could a test have caught this?” Then write that test.

Balance Is Key

Perfect test coverage isn’t the goal. Useful test coverage is. A few well-written integration tests often catch more bugs than dozens of unit tests.

Don’t let testing slow you down. If tests are painful to write or maintain, you’re probably doing something wrong.

Keep Learning

Testing practices evolve. New tools emerge. Languages add features. Stay curious and keep improving your testing skills.

The best developers I know are obsessive about testing. Not because they love writing tests, but because they hate debugging production issues at 3 AM.