Referring more to smaller places like my own - few hundred employees with ~20 person IT team (~10 developers).
I read enough about testing that it seems industry standard. But whenever I talk to coworkers and my EM, it’s generally, “That would be nice, but it’s not practical for our size and the business would allow us to slow down for that.” We have ~5 manual testers, so things aren’t considered “untested”, but issues still frequently slip through. It’s insurance software so at least bugs aren’t killing people, but our quality still freaks me out a bit.
I try to write automated tests for my own code, since it seems valuable, but I avoid it whenever it’s not straightforward. I’ve read books on testing, but they generally feel like either toy examples or far more effort than my company would be willing to spend. Over time I’m wondering if I’m just overly idealistic, and automated testing is more of a FAANG / bigger company thing.
Yeah, debugging tests is an important part of test driven development.
You also have to be careful. Some tests are for me to debug my code and aren’t part of the ‘contract’.
But on the other hand, it’s really nice. If I spend a couple of hours debugging actual code and come out of the process with internal tests, the next time it breaks, the new tests make it much easier to identify what broke. Previously, that would have been almost wasted effort, you fix it and just hope it never breaks again.