Excellent points. At the company that I work for, rigorous testing is an absolute necessity. Our web applications are critical to our users' business and any significant bugs in production is not acceptable. We have unit tests, selenium tests AND manual testing that goes on before any release.
As you mentioned, in the early stages of a product, bugs in production may be tolerable especially when you're not sure you have a viable product. However, once you hit a significant user base that is paying for the service, service disruptions from bugs can really hurt business.
Obviously we're not trying to be NASA, but I would say we spend 25-30% of our development time writing tests.
> Obviously we're not trying to be NASA, but I would say we spend 25-30% of our development time writing tests.
With absolutely no disrespect intended, this seems low. I've read some studies about testing, and I chat to my customers a lot about it (my startup, Circle, does hosted continuous integration), and I would estimate that most projects spend over 50% of time testing.
I initially wrote 35-40% but wasn't sure if that was realistic. No disrespect taken at all - I'm pushing for a more concerted effort on better unit test coverage. We also have a very large set of Selenium tests that run in a distributed build environment.
As you mentioned, in the early stages of a product, bugs in production may be tolerable especially when you're not sure you have a viable product. However, once you hit a significant user base that is paying for the service, service disruptions from bugs can really hurt business.
Obviously we're not trying to be NASA, but I would say we spend 25-30% of our development time writing tests.