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Delete tests

We’ve had decades of thought leadership around testing, especially coming from wholistic development philosophies like Agile, TDD, and BDD. After all that time and several supposedly superseding movements, the developers I talk to seem to have developed a folk wisdom around tests. That consensus seems to boil down to simple but mostly helpful axioms, like “include tests for your changes” and “write a new test when you fix a bug to prevent regressions”. Unfortunately, one of those consensus beliefs seems to be “it is blasphemy to delete a test”, and that belief is not just wrong but actively harmful.

We’ve had decades of thought leadership around testing, especially coming from wholistic development philosophies like Agile, TDD, and BDD. Flaky tests seem to fall into a cognitive hole, spreading the insidious costs across every engineer for months, and continuing to flake even after hours or days of attempts to fix them. The most common quick fix that I’ve seen, though, is the opposite: just turn off a chunk of tests because they always pass and the suite takes too long.

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