An (unexpected) advantage of having a robust automated test suite
We all know the benefits of having automated test suites. They help you find bugs before your code reaches production environment, they are a key element for CI/CD and they allow you to describe how your class works so in a way, they are a good source of documentation that anybody can read.
In the project I’m currently working on we happily welcomed three new developers recently, which had little to no experience with Ruby nor automated testing. Onboarding new developers into a project is always challenging but on these “stay at home” days the challenge was bigger since we all the training would have to be 100% remote.
After recommending the new devs Michael Hartl’s Rails Tutorial, we did some pair programming and later we assigned them small and simple user stories, that to be completed needed to have their corresponding tests in rspec. By having good examples to base on, they were able to create the requested tests, and by having a good coverage (≈80% and growing) they were able to code without the fear of breaking anything on an application they know little about yet. Here is the unexpected advantage (well, at least for me since it was my first experience of having new people joining a project with a robust test suite), the test suite helped us to speed up their onboarding process a lot! and they were soon able to take more complex requests.
I really encourage you and your teams to create automated tests suites, no matter what technology you are currently working on, as you may find more benefits in it than the obvious ones.
This was my very first article in Medium, I hope you have enjoyed it.
