From personal experience with bosses: no, often times it's not a sufficient argument.
If the choice is thought to be between:
* delivering value directly to the customer to justify a company's existence
* or adding tests to things that already work (shore up) in an effort to make more correct changes in the future
Will anyone be surprised how often it's the former that management will go for?
I've found the appetite for this type of testability/observability improvement work increases proportionally with the number of support calls being made from customers complaining about the current feature set being unstable and buggy. This work is less palatable when customers really are just looking for that next new feature you promised instead and everything else is a-ok. The exception being things like orbital navigation systems etc..
That's because you're not opening Jira tickets titled Refactor Foobar. You're just doing it as a consequence of resolving real business issues. I have seen developers, and once been the developer, suggesting a refactor to the PM. That rarely works: it does not (directly) address a business goal.
If the choice is thought to be between:
* delivering value directly to the customer to justify a company's existence
* or adding tests to things that already work (shore up) in an effort to make more correct changes in the future
Will anyone be surprised how often it's the former that management will go for?
I've found the appetite for this type of testability/observability improvement work increases proportionally with the number of support calls being made from customers complaining about the current feature set being unstable and buggy. This work is less palatable when customers really are just looking for that next new feature you promised instead and everything else is a-ok. The exception being things like orbital navigation systems etc..