A Business Case for Unit Testing In Back-end APIs

“We can’t make the change you’re looking for; it’s too risky.” “If you change code there, who knows what the impact will be?” “The software is just too fragile to address any tech debt right now.” If you have heard these statements (or something similar), you have no doubt been frustrated by poorly-written software. Having poorly-written software doesn’t necessarily mean that the developers who wrote the software are bad or incompetent; it often simply means that over time, if care isn’t taken to perpetually ensure quality, standards tend to slip as new patterns become both available and viable.

This slippage can then have a cumulative effect in which production bugs spook managers and users alike as the software gets more and more locked down. What you eventually get is an unmaintainable product that nobody is happy with. This is obviously a bad situation to be in, but one that can be avoided.

There is no silver bullet to make software function perfectly, especially software that has gotten into such a poorly-performing state. However, there is hope. Continue on to learn how to significantly decrease testing cycle times and add in new testing cycles to give better and faster feedback to developers. This greatly reduces the fragility of an application and decreases time to market for new features.