The power of testing: Why do fast cars need good brakes? So they can go even faster. Once you understand how this applies to software development, you can start shipping faster and more often!

Recently I have seen some posts from indie hackers saying that writing tests is a waste of time and that instead you just need to ship faster, well that always depends on the context!

Sure, if you’re writing one-off code for a landing page or boilerplate code, chances are you’ll get it right the first time, especially since you’re manually testing it as you build it. But if you are building software that will be used by either millions of end users or hundreds of developers, and that will evolve to add features over time, testing actually becomes a productivity tool.

You can offload the burden of manually testing components, integrations, APIs and features that you want to keep, and you can do major refactorings head-on to accommodate changes in your code and platform.

If you find yourself manually testing things after code changes either locally or in your staging environment, take the time to slow down and improve your brakes so that you can continue to ship at very high speed!