Code correctness, and testing strategies

[David]

>
> You must have poor project management/tracking.  You WILL pay the cost
> of testing, the only question is when.  The when does have an impact on
> other aspects of the development process.
>
> Speaking as someone who started in my current job four years ago as the
> third developer in a five-person company, I believe that your claim about
> the differences between small companies and large companies is specious.
> --

Might be a difference in project size/complexity then, rather than
company size. Most of my works projects are fairly small (a few
thousand lines each), very modular, and each is usually written and
maintained by one developer. A lot of the programs will be installed
together on a single server, but their boundaries are very clearly
defined.

Personally I've had to do very little bug fixing and maintenance.
Thorough testing of all my changes before they go into production
means that I've caught 99% of the problems, and there is very little
to fix later.

That's why I'm surprised to hear that such a huge amount of time is
spent on testing maintenance, and why the other posters make such a
big deal about unit tests.

I'm not a genius programmer, so it must be that I'm lucky to work on
smaller projects most of the time.

David.