A refresher on test typesīefore we dive into how we’re adding unit tests to our dev cycle, let’s go over the common test types. This article will cover what we’re doing to ramp up our unit testing program.

I’ve been singing the praises of unit testing for good while now, and I’m excited to bring them to Stack Overflow. If you’re looking to enable test-driven development (and we are), as well as quickly test new features, then you should be writing unit tests. End-to-end and integration tests are fine and part of a balanced testing program, but they can be slow. We had integration test suites in place, but our testing infrastructure-in particular, our unit tests-lagged far behind the maturity of our product. Unlike our community site users, they didn’t want to find bugs in production. We suddenly had a paid product that big companies were using. The site was made for developers, and we found that a lot of users were happy enough to report bugs and work around them while we fixed them.įast forward to a few years back when we launched Stack Overflow for Teams Enterprise.

Like all startups, we prioritized the quality attributes that mattered most to us and let many others fall by the wayside, including unit testing according to best practices. was built for developers by developers as a small startup. In the early days of Stack Overflow, we were just one website running a fast and lean operation.

Another word for running tests