marcuskeenton's blog

Ask any engineering team why their APIs are not better tested and you will rarely hear budget as the honest answer. What you hear, underneath the stated reasons, is inertia. Testing feels like a project, a thing you have to stop and set up, and there is never a good week to stop. So it gets deferred, and the cost of that deferral does not show up as a line item. It shows up as the outage nobody saw coming, the regression a customer reported before you did, the afternoon lost to debugging something a five-minute check would have caught. The absence of testing is not free.