Small Tests That Prevent Big Failures

I’ve spent way too many late nights debugging bugs that a simple test could have caught. You don’t need 100% coverage to sleep soundly — you need the right tests. A small, well-chosen test suite prevents most high-impact disasters.

Prioritize tests that hit the critical path: login flows, purchase processes, onboarding steps. Validate data contracts between services—think schemas, required fields, and those pesky edge cases in parsing or formatting.

tip

Contract tests or lightweight integration tests for API boundaries catch breaking changes fast, without the flakiness of full end-to-end runs.

Keep ‘em fast and reliable. Flaky tests? They’re just noise—skip ‘em until you can fix the determinism.

Small wins add up: an extra assertion on an API response, a fixture for that missed edge case, or a quick smoke test in CI.

These save hours of head-scratching later.

Over time, refine your suite. Remove redundant tests, add ones for newly discovered failure modes, and keep the focus on high-leverage coverage.