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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-15T22:29:58+00:00

I’ve just joined a team which has been working in a main-always mode for

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I’ve just joined a team which has been working in a main-always mode for the last 5 yrs (java, maven based project). Consequently plans to leverage unit testing have always been in the pipeline, never materialising (so far). A Great dev team has ensured that code quality is generally good, and there aren’t structural code issues, but there’s just no culture of writing jnuit tests. But I, having seen the benefits of unit testing, am a lone warrior here pushing for adoption of auto-testing.

The team layout is such that a separate testing team does manual testing of functionality before rolling out the code, and a change management team is a checkgate for change approvals and builds (no continuous integration either, so far).

Following are the hurdles: Because the code base is huge,and some of the original developers have left the team, any additional unit tests may be too little, too late.
Add to it that I may be the only one pushing for unit testing. Though my manager has been supportive of the idea, he doesnt want the change team to be bogged down by additional time required for the tests to run.

I’m of the opinion that a stand-alone CI tool can be used to start off with, and the change team must alter their scripts to skip tests, as and when they are added.

What would you do in my shoes?

P.S.: I’m aware of a similar question on stackoverflow , but in this one, the aim is to convince the different stakeholders and the best path to takel; not a technology comparison.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Sounds like you have a pretty good handle on the situation.

    Two things:

    1. Don’t expect to be able to fully unit test a 5 year old project. Assuming 5 developers working for 5 years, you’re in the neighborhood of 50,000 programmer-hours. Assuming that tests take as much time to write as code, you’d be doing pretty good to get 2-3% coverage in a year.

    2. So: Test new code, and write tests for modifications of older code. Get time / take time to set up CI of some kind. Gradually, you’ll build up a nice battery of tests.

    Since you’re apparently not drowning in bugs, start slow, gain momentum.

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