1. What you are doing starts at 0 value.
2. You can (usually) break it and it's ok.
3. You need to change stuff a LOT to figure out something that someone wants to use, rewriting tests makes that slower.
Every test case you write has a cost: It verifies that something of unknown value works. What if the value of that code is 0? Well, you just doubled down on something useless.
There are no absolutes in software development, but how we did it was have uncomfortably too few test cases when something is new, change the product for a while until someone actually wants to use it, then add a bunch of tests until we know it works from there on out.
And I hesitate to add: Also we work in Java so a bunch of testing comes for free, so there's that.
Startups _are_ different:
1. What you are doing starts at 0 value. 2. You can (usually) break it and it's ok. 3. You need to change stuff a LOT to figure out something that someone wants to use, rewriting tests makes that slower.
Every test case you write has a cost: It verifies that something of unknown value works. What if the value of that code is 0? Well, you just doubled down on something useless.
There are no absolutes in software development, but how we did it was have uncomfortably too few test cases when something is new, change the product for a while until someone actually wants to use it, then add a bunch of tests until we know it works from there on out.
And I hesitate to add: Also we work in Java so a bunch of testing comes for free, so there's that.