HACKER Q&A
📣 nomilk

How much test coverage did your MVP have?


The average test suite (in rails) is 103% of the application code; i.e. a 10000 line rails app has 10300 lines of test code. [1]

Larger apps have much more, up to 300%.

Should MVPs be extensively tested like these larger apps? Should it be a judgement call based on the severity of what could go wrong e.g. lose money/data (very bad) vs an inconvenience like a broken link (minor)?

To those who built an MVP in <2 months: did you build out a rigorous test suite in that time? Or did you validate your idea first and work on testing later?

[1] https://semaphoreci.com/blog/2018/04/11/state-of-testing-in-rails.html

  👤 leros Accepted Answer ✓
Almost none. The only time I write tests for MVPs is for small code blocks that are difficult to test by using the app or for critical things that I'm deathly afraid of breaking. My coverage is probably less than 0.1%.
👤 brudgers
validate your idea first

It is not an MVP until it is a viable product. That's the hard part. The minimum viable product might be performing everything manually without any software.

Good luck.