What is your experience as a freelancer developer with TDD/ATDD/BDD and CI/CD? When do you use them? How often do you use them?

#survey #freelancing #cicd #tdd

Recently, I had a tough discussion with a friend who wants to move to the freelancing world. We were talking about Unit Tests and that he implements them in everything. I told him that I'm not sure if this would work in his new life as a freelancer since it would increase his costs and time.

This was a difficult argument because his logic made sense since he has been working for a large corporation all his life. However, when you're working as a Freelancer -from my knowledge- all is about your Delivery Time and Costs:

However if you are new to freelancing and you need clients it can be difficult to tell a client that a project will be around double the time and cost.

Source: https://www.crondose.com/2016/09/use-tdd-on-freelance-projects/

And I agree with the comment above. I have more than one friend whose work is strictly freelancing for over 5 years. Their jobs are more they need to deliver me X App with this budget for Y date or they need to deliver me certain Plugin/Feature for my website for Y date with this budget.

I need to add that my friends' clients are not only StartUps but medium/large organizations around the world. I admit that certain organizations might tell you to implement these criteria like TDD or CI/CD, but I don't believe is a common practice.

If there is something I am sure of, it is if they had started to implement all these functionalities on pipelines, unit tests, etc. for each project that comes from completely different clients, their costs would have increased considerably and most likely hardly any company would want to pay. Especially, that in many cases they do not deliver the source codes, only the final app/plugin.

How about you as a Freelancer?

Have you ever used anything of these features like pipelines or unit tests? As I said before I'm from the corporate side and this is a common practice that is almost standardized. Nevertheless, freelancing is becoming more popular and this is uncommon and hard to implement in this area -in my belief-.