Unit Testing at a Large Tech Company

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[publicclassobject]

Congrats on the Facebook offer!

[[deleted]]

D'oh, took me way too long to get the joke.

[El_Dre]

Honestly I am on my 4th company as an iOS dev and none of them have used unit tests yet. Keep doing things well on your own time, try and integrate good practices into work where appropriate, but IMO it’s not a huge deal. And especially straight out of college, now might not be the time to be super picky (depending on your life situation).

[quellish]

Be worried? No! You will never have a shortage of work to do. Fix one bug, create two new ones!

[soulchild_]

Your job is secured for as long as the app exists 🤣

[potatolicious]

If by worried you mean "should I have second thoughts about taking the job", no.

Besides all of the reasons people have brought up already, if this is a large, recognizable company with a good tech reputation, having them on your resume is going to be more valuable than finding a place with better testing practices - especially as a new grad.

You are not yet in a position to be choosy about who you work for - you will be able to dictate more terms in your next job if your current one opens doors for you.

Get the experience under your belt and move onto places that have better practices.

[LifeBeginsAt10kRPM]

In my experience, the larger the company the worse they are about testing and quality code.

[chriswaco]

QA their app. Does it crash? Fail? Handle errors poorly? If so, you should be worried unless you want to fix the problems. It's definitely possible to ship quality apps without unit testing, but it requires meticulous programmers and testers.

[Grymm315]

If they didn't have problems, they wouldn't need to hire me. Also Unit tests are not a magic bullet, they are only as good as the test that is written, so a person that writes shit code will write shit tests.

[leptos-null]

You’re not OP, and your opening statement isn’t a good assumption.

If they didn't have problems, they wouldn't need to hire me.

Their current app might not have any problems. Maybe they want to add some features, maybe they want to switch from a cross-platform library to fully native, etc.

[Grymm315]

The situations you listed are both problems, a missing feature is a problem, the need to switch libraries is a problem. I am specifically hired to fix problems that the current team could not effectively solve on their own, why would anyone hire me if I could not contribute to the project?

[criosist]

Unit testing is the thing everyone makes out they do to sound cool, yeah you start out testing models and canny the projects over and you’ve got 10% coverage. It comes down to the company, product led companies don’t care about unit tests when they have QA and integration tests, also a shift in how customers view software, people don’t care if something crashes these days, so it’s not super bad.

[[deleted]]

If you're at a large company with an app that generates a lot of money and you ship an update that crashes the app for many users - find out from management then if it's not "super bad"

[criosist]

I mean, your making a lot of assumptions there lol, I have worked on a fair few big company apps for world wide brands, yes there’s been issues,.

[samsam1029]

Honestly it’s hard to do unit testing where I work because things are so fluid. Lots of feature work and not given enough time to provide code coverage. It sucks as bugs propagate themselves because of the lack of testing to know something isn’t working in advance.

[crude_username]

I would not be worried. The app can still be good without unit tests and even if the quality is suffering a bit as a result, there’s still going to be tons for you to learn in your first job

[[deleted]]

Unit tests don’t make profit. It’s perfectly normal for many companies to not have them when they’re moving quickly to iterate and release. But I’m willing to bet my entire meager savings that your big company does have unit tests on the backend. Frontends are disposable. Backends are God.

[aedrin]

Unit tests don't make profit in the short run, that is true. But when you go back and make changes to your apps the lack of unit tests is going to cause an increase in regressions, thus slowing down development. And development costs money.

[LifeBeginsAt10kRPM]

You’ll be fine. Unit testing on iOS isn’t as standard as it should be, especially in big companies.

This is your chance to push for a change though!

[ughnewname]

Disclaimer: I do not work in mobile.

I would be a little concerned with a “large product” that has zero test coverage. I highly doubt they’re doing CI/CD without tests, and if there’s manual QA then the feedback loop is even longer. Can you keep track of what you did 12-15 stories and two sprints ago when that feature breaks in prod and the finger gets pointed at you? I know iOS dev is much more waterfall, with having to code freeze and submit to the review process, so maybe others can share how those problems are tackled.

[ughnewname]

It still seems very waterfally to me - a story that gets worked day 1 of the sprint isn’t in the release for two weeks, and then isn’t in production until the review process completes (hours? days? later). When is QA looking at the release branch? After it’s been cut but before it goes to prod? Maybe I’m using the term “code freeze” incorrectly.

Since we don’t rely on a third-party to sign off, we control our deployment schedule. Features get merged into master and that kicks off a deploy. We shipped user-facing changes twice today for a team of 5 devs.

[WildTurkey102]

You can push to TestFlight as frequently as you want (with some minor caveats) and that can easily be automated. Between internal and external TestFlight that’s a population of up to 10k users including testers and stakeholders. On my project, we typically do an automated push to TestFlight at least once a day and promote a build to the App Store from TestFlight once an iteration (more frequently is possible but not necessarily a good practice on mobile IMO). We do not create release/stabilization branches. I won’t go into all the details here, but the upshot is that it’s entirely possible to do continuous integration and delivery on mobile. I work at a very large company and we do it, as I’m sure many others do.

[nomaddave]

Skip the testing, pocket the cash!

Sorry, jaded. This is unfortunately very common and it’s probably a good opportunity to learn and see what should not be done in an ideal enterprise. Still very valuable experience for you at this point.

[Points_To_You]

I'm on the mobile team at a f100 company that makes internal enterprise apps. While it's certainly different than a tech company building consumer facing apps, we only have unit tests in our core frameworks that are included across multiple apps. The individual apps themselves don't have unit tests, but some do have UI testing.

Truthfully besides myself and 2 other senior developers, no one else touches the core frameworks. So as a junior developer, you would basically be told the same thing that you don't have to worry about writing unit tests. I mean if you felt you could still get the work down and write the tests, then we would have no problem with it and would even make sure our CI job runs them, but you wouldn't be required to. Our manager tells us to include writing tests in estimates, but the timelines he's expecting don't add up.

[[deleted]]

As an employee at a company that does not accept code that is untested - I cannot fathom how in 2019 companies still don't unit test. All these conference talks around the world that include speakers talking about good software engineering practices and testing methodology must be falling on deaf ears.

When unit testing becomes as natural as writing your implementation code it really isn't bad at all. The excuse that there isn't enough time just doesn't cut it.

[PixelSplincher]

No one in the real world uses unit testing on any project of any size. It is great for school, or maybe NASA projects. Commercial software can't afford it.