Flashback

I joined Adobe as my first full time job back in June 2023 (about a year ago). And since before this I had no prior experience of working on big codebases, I never really spend enough time writing tests. I was always in a hurry to ship the code and move on to the next task.

Recently

Over the last one year, I have been constantly learning and improving my skills and also my mindset. For most of the times, I write tests for every functionality I build. And this never really bothered me until recently.

The Problem

So I working on a bug fix in one of the components in our library.

For those who don't know, I work on Adobe's design system library for web. It's called Spectrum Web Components.

The change was pretty simple. The menu-item was not reflecting the selected state when the value was set. I checked the code and found that the selected attribute was not being set on the menu-item.

So I added the attribute and made a PR.

<sp-menu-item
    .selected=${option.value === this.itemValue} // This is the attribute I added
>
    ${option.itemText}
</sp-menu-item>

The Review

The PR was reviewed by my senior and he asked me to add a test for this change. I immediately texted him back saying that I wanna talk about why we need a test for this change.

The Discussion

We went back and forth on this for a while.

Basically my argument (which sounds very stupid as I am writing about it) was that this is such an expected behavior that we don't need a test for this. This should have been taken care of while writing this component in the first place.

I was trying to argue for not writing a test for behaviours that are bare minimum expected from a component.

Now that I am writing about it, I feel so stupid because the reality is that

We ideally would expect the bare minimum to work as expected always. And to make sure it does, we need to write even more tests.

The Conclusion

Don't be like Tarun.

Make sure you write tests for the bare minimum expected behaviour of your codebase atleast.

PS: I am yet to add tests in that PR as I'm writing this. I'll do that now bwahahaha.