this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2025
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I don't really see how this follows. Why do the second one necessary have to be lazy, and what stops the first one from being lazy as well.
The reason I like it to be different people is so there are two sets of eyes looking at the same problem without the need for doing a job twice. If you miss something while implementing, it's easier for you to miss it during test writing. It's very hard to switch to testing the concept and not the specific implementation, but if you weren't the one implementing it, you're not "married" to the code and it's easier for you to spot the gaps.
Devs are more invested in code they wrote themselves. When I'm writing tests for something I didn't write, I'm less personally invested in it. Looking at PRs by other devs when we do pushes for improving coverage, I'm not alone here. That's just human psychology, you care more about things you built than things you didn't.
I think testing should be an integral part of the dev process. I don't think any code should be merged until there are tests proving its correctness. Having someone else write the tests encourages handing tests to jr devs since they're "lower priority."
This, I think, is a very bad part of the problem and shouldn't be happening regardless
It shouldn't, but it does. The person who writes the code cares more about its correctness, so I trust them to write better tests.
I absolutely don't. Since we're talking about bad cases anyway, I don't trust a developer to be diligent in finding bugs in their code more than I believe they will try to make all the tests pass. And it's easier and better for the ego to achieve that if you write shit tests that only cover cases that you know will work.
Unit tests aren't intended to find bugs, they're intended to prove correctness. There should be a separate QA process for finding bugs, which involves integration testing. When QA inevitably finds a bug, the unit tests get updated with that case (and any similar cases).
And that's what code reviews are for. If your tests don't sufficiently cover the logic, the change should be rejected until they do. It's a lot easier to verify the tests cover the logic if the tests are submitted w/ the logic changes.