Why I Love Automated Testing

I love automated testing. I love Extreme Programming(XP) and I love agile programming and the agile methodologies. So why does it seem like every company I work for does not share my love?

The reason is simple. XP is hard. As an organization you have to trust your developers and your developers have to adhere to a rigid and unrelenting standard of repeated testing and quality controls at every level of the software process. In an agile environment customers are directly involved in decisions about the software despite their usual lack of technical knowledge. This poses it's own set of problems as customers need to be kept informed, and need to make good decisions but they also need to be held accountable for their decisions and made aware of the ramifications of their decisions in terms of coding effort and cost. That above all else is the core of agile programming, accountability, and nobody likes to be held accountable. But god I love XP. It's just better, it's a better way to write software, it's a better way to run a software team and at the end of the day it's just better.

Oh well, I'm slowly converting followers, one step at a time.