Adoption is a social problem
Zac is a key contributor to the Python ecosystem, and a maintainer of Pytest, Hypothesis, and has written multiple PEPs about Python’s Exception type. He’s added tests to the CI flow for CPython, Numpy, and numerous other critical projects.
He came to BugBash to talk about why everything is under-tested, and there was this wonderful, alternate-history quality to his talk, because we got to see what it’s like to work on advanced testing tools as a pure passion project – and it turns out that it’s a lot like working on advanced testing tools as a business.
No one tests their software enough because testing is always a tradeoff. It takes time and energy to test your software, and developers can (and usually would rather) spend that time writing more code instead.
So Zac’s call to arms is this: we not only need to build better tools for testing software – we need to make them easy to adopt.
One of Zac’s key points is that adoption is a social problem, not a technical one – but parts of it are amenable to technical solutions.
At Antithesis, we’ve run into many of the adoption challenges that he describes, and while we’ve implemented technical solutions for many of them (like flaky tests and difficult bisections), there are many more to come – we’ll have some exciting things to announce in the coming weeks.
