Implementing unit testing at a company that doesn't do it

Posted by Pete on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by Pete
Published on 2012-07-10T15:52:14Z Indexed on 2012/07/10 21:24 UTC
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TDD

My company's head of software development just "resigned" (i.e. fired) and we are now looking into improving the development practices at our company. We want to implement unit testing in all software created from here on out.

Feedback from the developers is this:

We know testing is valuable
But, you are always changing the specs so it'd be a waste of time
And, your deadlines are so tight we don't have enough time to test anyway

Feedback from the CEO is this:

I would like our company to have automated testing, but I don't know how to make it happen
We don't have time to write large specification documents

How do developers get the specs now? Word of mouth or PowerPoint slide. Obviously, that's a big problem. My suggestion is this:

Let's also give the developers a set of test data and unit tests
That's the spec. It's up to management to be clear and quantitative about what it wants.
The developers can put it whatever other functionality they feel is needed and it need not be covered by tests

Well, if you've ever been in a company that was in this situation, how did you solve the problem? Does this approach seem reasonable?

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