Are you familiar with neocities (geocities revival thing)? It's not anti-scripting but it may scratch your itch.
yournameplease
If your school has Hackathons, try to do those, ideally with friends. The atmosphere is honestly a bit horrible in my opinion and you may get instant imposter syndrome, but it gives you a project to talk about.
Who’s sped up by your automated tests are your team members and you-in-three-months.
Definitely true. I am very thankful when I fail a test and know I broke something and need to clean up after myself. Also very nice as insurance against our more "chaotic" developer(s).
I've advocated for tests as a team effort. Problem is just that we don't really have any technical leadership, just a hands-off EM and hands-off CTO. Best I get from them is "Yes, you should test your code." ...Doesn't really help when some developers just aren't interested in testing. I am warming another developer on my team up to testing, so at least I may get another developer or two on the testing kick for a bit.
And as for management rating me... I don't really worry too much. As I mentioned, hands off management. Heck, we didn't even get performance reviews last year.
another team was developing the next best thing under management guidance (so it would become the next monolithic legacy code)
Pretty much what my team is doing. No need to spend time improving the old system when this one will replace it so soon, right? (And no, we will not actually replace anything anytime soon.)
We ~~have~~used to have a scrum master so we're already agile! /s
They want those things, sure, but I think it would take multiple weeks of dedicated work for me to set up tests on our primary system that would cover much of anything. Big investment that might enable faster future development is what I find hard to sell. I am already seen as the "automated testing guy" on my (separate) project, and it doesn't really look like I'm that much faster than anyone else.
What I've been meaning to do is start underloading my own sprint items by a day or two and try to set up some test infrastructure in my spare Fridays to show some practical use. But boy is that a hard thing to actually hold myself to.
Leadership may be idiots, but devs are mostly just burnt out and recognized that quality isn't a very high priority and know not to take too much pride in the product. I think it's my own problem that I have a hard time separating my pride from my work.
Thanks for the response. It's good to know that my experience here isn't super common.
The combination is bad.
I'm not really sure what there is to do about that, then. My own project is already is about to hit 3 years on something that was intended to be <1 year total, due to constant scope creep. Nothing bad seems to ever come out of the delays though, so I tend to ignore most of the complaints.
If you see it as an argument
I don't really see it as that. "Discussion" is more what I try to do. But you are correct that I don't think I can argue on their terms.
are you sure you understand what they value and prioritize
Probably not exactly, but my point is that the priorities technical leadership says we value (quality, scalability, fast iterations), run counter to what we actually prioritize. I often ask why we prioritize Project X over Project Y and the answer is almost always a variation of:
- "We can't let IT be the reason the Project X is late."
- "The business thinks we've been working on Project X a long time (often not true) so we need to show progress."
- "Project X was promised for Release Z so it needs to get done over anything else."
Which is why I said our priorities are more about appearing busy and important than anything else. (My own project isn't even wanted by most business users. It was spearheaded by the VP of IT as a huge technical modernization effort despite doing almost nothing to improve or get away from the legacy system it is "replacing".) So I think the reason I have such trouble getting buy-in is that better testing runs counter to IT's true priorities, even if it provides business value.
[Trust] might be eroded down due to the consistent failure to meet estimates.
Perhaps. But trust is already pretty darn low for that very reason.
like they insist on having testing even when the value of it the way it’s being implemented is a little debatable
I started to feel like I was this guy when I asked someone to test their code after multiple sprints of being sent back from QA. Good to hear I'm not the crazy one, I guess.
Perhaps it's just part of being somewhere where tech is seen as a cost center? Technical leadership loves to talk big about how we need to invest in our software and make it more scalable for future growth. But when push comes to shove, they simply say yes to nearly every business request, tell us to fix things later, and we end up making things less scalable and harder to test.
It feels terrible and burns me out, but we never seem to seriously suffer for poor quality, so I thought this could be all in my head. I guess I've just been gaslit by my EM into thinking this lack of testing is a common occurrence.
(A programming lemmy may not be a terribly representative sample, but I don't see anyone here anywhere close to as wild west as my place.)
This is a bigger problem than tests.
You mean things going over estimates or SM/EM complaining about it?
You’re presenting a solution for a problem that the team either does not see as important or doesn’t think exists at all.
Definitely it's a known issue, and I think people think it's semi-important. Feels like every other standup has a spiel from the EM about "we need to test things, stop breaking things, etc.".
Whenever I argue on their terms though, I quickly "lose", because business terms seem to be, "agree to everything from the business, look busy, and we will have time for IT concerns (i.e., testing) when we are done with business projects for the year (i.e., never)."
If I want any meaningful change, I think it will need to be be something I work around management on.
I guess since we have manual QAs, there's less motivation to get away from manual testing as it's literally their job description. Not to say we aren't wasting time and money still. I do find other devs and I still need to spend a lot of time ourselves manually sanity checking things.
That all does sound like my dream end goal, though, thanks for the responses.
It was pretty cool when I tried it on my personal machine. Only annoyance was that it would sometimes generate something I knew was wrong, but my auto-complete muscle memory would use it anyways.
My work machine is pretty underpowered though, so I get suggestions probably less than 1 in 100 times.