There was a comment on here a few years ago from a developer with experience working on the Oracle database codebase which put me off it for life: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941
To me, millions test sounded like a good thing. The main issue I had with the description of that workflow is that if the tests take 20-30 hours to run, someone in Oracle is not spending sufficient money on build hardware! They should have tens of thousands of servers, not hundreds, and they should be kitted out with the fastest processors and NVMe drives money can buy.
If you look at how companies like NVIDIA do things, they throw ungodly amounts of compute at development and simulations. Entire data centres worth!
It's possible to have millions of tests and NOT have the problems described in that story. SQLite has a famously thorough test suite and I've seen the SQLite developers turn around a suggested improvement to their codebase - including authoring the fix, testing it and landing it, in just a few hours.
OMG, comment right after would explain why we have a chip shortage....
"Sounds like ASML, except that Oracle has automated tests.
(ASML makes machines that make chips. They got something like 90% of the market. Intel, Samsung, TSMC etc are their customers)
ASML has 1 machine available for testing, maybe 2. These are machines that are about to be shipped, but not totally done being assembled yet, but done enough to run software tests on. This is where changes to their 20 million lines of C code can be tested on. Maybe tonight, you get 15 minutes for your team's work. Then again tomorrow, if you're lucky. Oh but not before the build is done, which takes 8 hours.
Otherwise pretty much the same story as Oracle.
Ah no wait. At ASML, when you want to fix a bug, you first describe the bugfix in a Word document. This goes to various risk assessment managers. They assess whether fixing the bug might generate a regression elsewhere. There's no tests, remember, so they do educated guesses whether the bugfix is too risky or not. If they think not, then you get a go to manually apply the fix in 6+ product families. Without automated tests.
(this is a market leader through sheer technological competence, not through good salespeople like oracle. nobody in the world can make machines that can do what ASML's machines can do. they're also among the hottest tech companies on the dutch stock market. and their software engineering situation is a 1980's horror story times 10. it's quite depressing, really)"
Where do they find people willing to put up with that. Some people have a high threshold for job pain versus uncertainty around job hunting pain. I'd much rather the latter.
