CODLIY · ENGINEERING

Testing strategy for small teams: 80/20 pragmatism

April 24, 2026 · 1 min read · 0 claps

You do not need 100% coverage. You need the tests that would have caught the last five bugs you shipped.

The pyramid, honestly

Unit: pure logic, domain rules, calculations. Cheap, fast, reliable.
Feature: route → controller → database, asserting the observable behavior. This is where most of our value lives.
Browser: only for flows that cannot be expressed at the HTTP layer — drag and drop, complex state machines, webhooks with signatures.

What we stopped doing

We stopped writing tests for getters and setters. We stopped mocking every collaborator. We stopped aiming for an arbitrary coverage number and started aiming for a short, confident list of scenarios per feature.