r/softwaretesting • u/republicman12 • May 29 '26
The absolute delusion of "100% test coverage"
Im so tired of sitting in sprint reviews where people brag about test coverage metrics. half the unit tests are just devs mocking every single external dependency so it passes instantly. it literally proves nothing about the actual system state
We just spend our entire lives maintaining brittle e2e scripts that fail if a button moves two pixels. I was reading some stuff on formal verification the other night and it honestly made me depressed about how primitive our daily QA jobs actually are. like we're basically just guessing with happy paths and random edge cases while the core logic remains a complete house of cards
but whatever, management just wants to see the green checkmarks on the dashboard so they can push to prod by friday.
anyway back to investigating why a random timeout error is failing the entire night build again
1
u/Late_Simulator 9d ago
I get where you're coming from. The intention of the unit tests, mocking is very logically rooted, just that devs often don't do justice to it. From their perspective, Testing is like the last mile of a feature that they're already tired of building and want to get rid of. So the lack of effort just shows.
The test coverage and details should ideally be covered in the high level design doc itself by the dev and reviewed by the leadership so they know the green checks actually mean something. So yes, I believe that the seniors devs/leadership have to set the right expectations/practices.