How do you persuade others to write unit tests? [closed]

Answer 1

Use a test-coverage tool. Make it very visible. That way everybody can easily see how much code in each area is passed, failed and untested.

Then you may be able to start a culture where "untested" is a sign of bad coding, "failed" is a sign of work in progress and "passed" is a sign of finished code.

This works best if you also do "test-first". Then "untested" becomes "you forgot step 1".

Of course you don't need 100% test coverage. But of one area has 1% coverage and another has 30%, you have a metric for which area is most likely to fail in production.

Answer 2

If developers are seeing that the "successful" developers are writing unit tests, and they are still not doing it then I suggest unit tests should become part of the formal development life-cycle.

E.g. nothing can be checked in until a unit test is written and reviewed.

Answer 3

Probably reefnet_alex' answer helps you: Is Unit Testing worth the effort?

I think it was Fowler who said: "Imperfect tests, run frequently, are much better than perfect tests that are never written at all". I interprate this as giving me permission to write tests where I think they'll be most useful even if the rest of my code coverage is woefully incomplete.

Answer 4

I have found that "evangelizing" or preaching rarely works. As others have said, do it your way for your own code, make it known that you do it, but don't try to force others to do it. If people ask about it be supportive and helpful. Offer to do a few lunch-time seminars or informal dog and pony shows. That will do a lot more than just complaining to your manager or the other developers that you have a hard time writing tests for code they wrote.

Slow and steady - it is not going to change overnight.

Once I realized that at one place where I worked the acceptance for peer reviews improved tremendously. My group just did it and stopped trying to get others to do it. Eventually people started asking s about how we got some of the success we did. Then it was easier.

Answer 5

You mentioned that your manager is on board with unit tests. If that's the case, then why isn't he (she) enforcing it? It isn't your job to get everybody else to follow along or to teach them and in fact, other developers will often resent you if you try to push it on them. In order to get your fellow developers to write unit tests, the manager has to emphasize it strongly. It might end up that part of that emphasis is education on unit test implementation which you might end up being the educator and that's great, but management of it is everything.

If you're in an environment where the group decides the style of implementation, then you have more of a say in how the group dynamic should be. If you are in that sort of environment and the group doesn't want to emphasize unit tests while you do, then maybe you're in the wrong group/company.

Answer 6

People (and processes) don't change without one or more pain points. So you need to finjd the significant pain points and demonstrate how unit testing might help deal with them.

If you can't find any significant pain points, then unit testing may not add a lot of value to your current process.

As Steve Lott implies, delivering better results than the other team members will also help. But without the pain points, my experience is that people won't change.