# The tests nobody asked for

By Valentin Galfré · Published 2026-09-09 · 3 min read · https://galfrevn.com/writing/tests-nobody-asked-for

> Joining a software factory as the most junior engineer and fixing the thing nobody had time for: every release broke something that used to work.

I joined Crombie in March 2022 as the most junior engineer in the room. A software factory runs many client projects at once, each with its own stack, deadline and expectations, and nobody had time to ask the new junior to set up testing. So nobody did.

I did it anyway. It is the first thing I did at a job that nobody had asked for, and it taught me more about how to be useful than anything I shipped on purpose.

## Regressions were the tax

Every release on a client project broke something that used to work. Not always something big. A form that stopped validating, a filter that returned everything, a page that was fine on desktop and blank on mobile. The client noticed before we did, the fix took a day, and the next release broke something else.

Nobody called that a problem. It was the weather. The way you know a tax is a tax is that everyone has stopped noticing they pay it.

## Fixing things nobody asked me to fix

The first weeks, I fixed the build. Then the deploy. Then I added tests around the parts of the project that had broken twice. None of this was in a ticket. It was the kind of work you can do as a junior precisely because nobody is watching what you do with the hour after the ticket is closed.

The tests were not clever. Integration tests around the flows the client cared about, run on every push, red or green. What made them work was not the framework. It was that they ran before anyone could merge, so "did you test it" stopped being a question and became a check.

> **Rule.** If a bug happened twice, it gets a test before it gets a fix.

## The number that made it a policy

After a few releases with the tests in place, the regression count on that project dropped to almost nothing, and the client noticed that too. That is the moment a personal habit became a company practice: not when I proposed it, but when a number made it obvious.

By the time I was leading teams there, automated testing was in every project we shipped, and I could hand a team of eight a rule instead of a request: nothing merges red.

## What I actually learned

Being useful as a junior is mostly about the hour nobody is watching. The ticket is the job. The build, the deploy, the tests, the thing that broke twice, that is the career.

And the way to change how a company works is not to argue for it. It is to do it on one project, quietly, and let the number argue.

> Nobody asked for the tests. Everybody kept them.