Chapter 18Reducing the Test Automation Backlog
Many companies with existing legacy code bases bump into a huge impediment when they want to get Agile: lack of test automation!
Without test automation, making changes in the system is very hard, because things break without anybody noticing. When the new release goes live, the real users discover the defects, causing embarrassment and an expensive hotfix—or even worse, a chain of hotfixes, because each hotfix introduces new, unanticipated defects.
This makes the team terribly afraid to change code and therefore reluctant to improve the design of the code, which leads to a downward spiral of worse and worse code as the system grows.
The good news is that you can do something about it!
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