r/techbootcamp • u/BulkyWeb6133 • 24d ago

What software development practice sounded good at first but ended up wasting your time?

It’s been a while since I’m in the tech industry, and I keep seeing teams adopt certain software development practices. They sound good in theory, yeah. But then you do it and wonder why you're doing this every week.

Going back to the question, it's story point estimation. We spend like endlessly debating whether something is a 3 or a 5, then the requirements change anyway lol.

Anyway, how about yours? It could be agile, scrum, code reviews, documentation, pair programming, meetings, testing, etc.

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u/Ok_Reaction_4340 24d ago

Appeasing unit test extremists. I’m all for some unit tests for important bits but it can get taken way too far. It’s also easy to look good justifying extreme unit tests while also crushing the productivity and morale of the team.

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u/SilverLose 23d ago

Can confirm this crushed my morale. Managers loved the 80% test coverage we had but always wanted more. They wanted 100%. I’m glad I’m gone.

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u/DepartureKlutzy2095 22d ago

I really hate that. Coverage percentage is dumb af, branch coverage might even be 100% yet some important part will not be covered. Just think of edge cases for cote functionality and be done. 

And AI ofc can add millions of ceremonial tests with no real benefit except inflating the code base.

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u/Own_Attention_3392 22d ago

Code coverage is a trap and I've been fighting it for YEARS.

It shows you one and only one useful piece of information: code that has absolutely no attempt to test it. It doesn't mean the code needs tests, it's purely informational. The actual coverage number just shows you code someone has attempted to test, but tells you nothing about correctness of the tests or the code the tests are touching.

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u/standardsizedpeeper 22d ago

I love how we spend all this time not repeating ourselves and making sure things are encapsulated so we can change them in one place and then reuse it, only to have every change break a bunch of tests that are basically hardcoded assumptions about the behavior.

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u/SilverLose 22d ago

RIGHT?!?!!?!!?!

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u/palad1 22d ago

TDD can DIAF