Philosophy

In general we don’t do quick one-line changes without thinking. Not even for supposedly temporary fixes, since out of experience, most temporary things tend to stay long in your code.

We are not bored, but we try to find the sweet spot between

• develop good designed, well tested code
• have the time to do needed refactoring on the go
• but keep the speed to be able to do quick changes and new features

Even when there are critical bugs, you can break things by doing the fix in a rush without thinking.

For us as a startup speed is important, but bad code and breaking things would hit us harder than an extra hour to write a test.

By writing tests we reduce the fear of breaking things in code you never saw. This makes it far easier for new people to develop features or even do refactoring. So keep in mind when writing tests:

• write as much tests as are needed that no one can break your feature unintentionally.
• try to (partially) replace manual testing with writing the tests directly.

Then you’ll have a good test from the beginning.