When QA’s rainbow test matrix meets the senior dev’s one-color worldview
Description
Two blue silhouette cartoon figures face each other. On the left, a woman labelled “Tech Lead & QA” points to a long vertical legend of 24 colored dots, each with small black text: “Unit tests, Static tests, System tests, E2E tests, Load tests, White-Box, Black-Box, AC tests, Spike tests, Integration tests, Dynamic tests, Passive tests, Exploration, Balance tests, Meme tests, Regression tests, Acceptance tests, Mutation tests, Performance tests, Scenario tests, Behavioural tests, Functional tests, Non-Functional tests, Recovery tests, Cross tests.” Every entry has its own hue. On the right, a man labelled “Senior Engineer” ignores the spectrum and points confidently at giant bold words “UNIT TESTS.” The meme humorously contrasts QA’s nuanced taxonomy against a senior engineer’s tendency to bucket everything into the same target, riffing on real-world battles over test nomenclature, coverage metrics, and what actually runs in the CI pipeline
Comments
21Comment deleted
If it fits inside the same Docker container, the senior says it’s a unit test - bonus points if the linter passes and the CFO thinks it increased velocity
After 20 years in the industry, you realize the real test pyramid isn't about coverage percentages - it's about how many testing frameworks your team will adopt before someone finally admits that 80% of production bugs could have been caught by the humble unit test that runs in 3 milliseconds instead of the 45-minute E2E suite that breaks whenever Mercury is in retrograde
When your Tech Lead presents a 25-item testing taxonomy that would make IEEE proud, but you've been in production long enough to know that 80% of bugs are caught by unit tests, 15% by integration tests, and the remaining 5% by angry customers at 3 AM. The real test suite is: 'Does it compile?', 'Does it pass CI?', and 'Will it wake me up on-call?' Everything else is just documentation for the audit
Our 'comprehensive test plan' is 5k unit tests and a very nervous SRE - aka the Ice Cream Cone anti-pattern
If your 'unit test' needs Docker Compose, a database seed, Kafka and an IAM role, you didn’t shift testing left - you rebuilt a flaky E2E test with better branding
Tech leads blueprint the testing cathedral; senior engineers deliver the unit test cornerstone - solid, shippable, scalable
I don't even know most of these words Comment deleted
Lol right Comment deleted
meme tests lol Comment deleted
No smoke tests? Comment deleted
Also forgot scream tests Comment deleted
🫡 Comment deleted
Poor data centers can't work when stressed Comment deleted
😞 Comment deleted
Gigachad engineer: test on prod Comment deleted
Scream test = as long as nobody screams at you, everything's fine. Comment deleted
We also utilize what we have dubbed the ellipsis test. One of our largest customers always ends his emails with three periods. If he drops them and uses just one full stop, you know he's serious. Comment deleted
Sounds like me during prompting 🌚 And they then say LLMs ain’t sentient lol Comment deleted
Disaster recovery tests? Upgrade path tests? Migration tests? Comment deleted
Migrane Comment deleted
Saw a woman fall on a bikr today. Didnt see the moment. Make of that what you want. Comment deleted