A Tester and/or Unit Tests Should Be Your Friend

1 minute read

A little bit over three years when I started at Rocket Mortgage as a Software Architect I did not know/understand how valuable the Quality Analyst (QA) or testing role was to a product or application. When I started, on Day 2, Brian Friesen introduced me to a lot of people but one of the introductions I remember the most was to Hilary Weaver-Robb (https://g33klady.wordpress.com/). The reason why I remember this is because she had since built a conference talk around it. Titled something like “QA and Developers should be best of friends” or something like that… :smile: The story goes like this…

Day 2 at a new place after spending a FULL day in front of the company fire hose getting introduced to everything that is Rocket Mortgage, Brian introduced me to my new surrogate team (I was on loan for few months). The introductions went along, and eventually, Brian introduces me to Hilary (some know her as Heather). Brian says “This is Hilary, our QA.” I immediately, mostly jokingly, say “Ugh.” We all chuckled, although I believe Hilary, excuse me, Heather, secretly started hating me. And while I was partly joking at the time, in my experience before meeting Hilary, I’ve never understood the value of a Quality Analyst. Until now. Whether Hilary wants to believe it or not, I consider her a good friend, although I am not sure the feeling is mutual.

Anyway, the real reason for this post. In the last three years at Rocket Mortgage, I have learned the value of writing Unit test and having testers on a team. There have been far too many times (at least one :smile: ) where I have pushed code for my personal projects (Desert Code Camp, MVP Summit Events, etc.) and things have failed miserably. So, I have gone back to all of my personal projects and have added Unit Tests and you should too! Not just in your personal projects but your professional ones. I know, it takes more time to write a Unit test or I write it the first time. Believe me, it doesn’t, and you don’t. You’ll probably spend more time researching and fixing your problem that you would have “wasted” on building a unit test. So just do it!