At one of my old jobs, we had a suite of browser tests that would run on PR. It’d stand up the application, open headless chrome, and click through stuff. This was the final end-to-end test suite to make sure that yes, you can still log in and everything plays nicely together.
Developers were constantly pinging slack about “why is this test broken??”. Most of the time, the error message would be like “Never found an element matching css selector #whatever” or “Element with css selector #loading-spinner never went away”. There’d be screenshots and logs, and usually when you’d look you’d see like the loading spinner was stuck, and the client had gotten a 400 back from the server because someone broke something.
We put a giant red box on the CI/CD page explaining what to do. Where to read the traces, reminding them there’s a screenshot, etc. Still got questions.
I put a giant ascii cat in the test output, right before the error trace, with instructions in a word bubble. People would ping me, “why is this test broken?”. I’d say “What did the cat say?” They’d say “What cat?” And I’d know they hadn’t even looked at the error message.
There’s a kind of learned helplessness with some developers and tests. It’s weird.
There’s a kind of learned helplessness with some developers and tests. It’s weird.
I got handed the keys to the network monitoring suite many moons ago. I immediately started editing the default alert actions to display relevant information, and in some outlier cases escalation procedures.
Most times, it was ignored. Other times, it was skimmed and half-followed. A few people outright refused to do anything differently than they had before (kick it up the ladder).
At one of my old jobs, we had a suite of browser tests that would run on PR. It’d stand up the application, open headless chrome, and click through stuff. This was the final end-to-end test suite to make sure that yes, you can still log in and everything plays nicely together.
Developers were constantly pinging slack about “why is this test broken??”. Most of the time, the error message would be like “Never found an element matching css selector #whatever” or “Element with css selector #loading-spinner never went away”. There’d be screenshots and logs, and usually when you’d look you’d see like the loading spinner was stuck, and the client had gotten a 400 back from the server because someone broke something.
We put a giant red box on the CI/CD page explaining what to do. Where to read the traces, reminding them there’s a screenshot, etc. Still got questions.
I put a giant ascii cat in the test output, right before the error trace, with instructions in a word bubble. People would ping me, “why is this test broken?”. I’d say “What did the cat say?” They’d say “What cat?” And I’d know they hadn’t even looked at the error message.
There’s a kind of learned helplessness with some developers and tests. It’s weird.
i think that guy works for us now :D
the best bit is he pings multiple senior devs in slack separately.
so we are all wasting our time doing the same shit in parallel for the same muppet.
Another reason why I don’t want more copilot and chatgpt to beginners
I got handed the keys to the network monitoring suite many moons ago. I immediately started editing the default alert actions to display relevant information, and in some outlier cases escalation procedures.
Most times, it was ignored. Other times, it was skimmed and half-followed. A few people outright refused to do anything differently than they had before (kick it up the ladder).
Glad to be rid of that place.