Software Engineering Daily · Thursday, October 1, 2026
David Burns advises SaaS companies to focus on creating one test for each critical path as a starting point for their testing strategy. He emphasizes balancing test suite speed, correctness, and risk, suggesting that parallelizing tests and reducing cognitive load on developers are key to maintaining high-quality software.
“And ideally, you should only have one test for one critical path, because if you have thoughts about how you're architecting your system, you'll have other layers of protections built in from observability to telemetry to kind of everything in between.”
“It's about speed versus correctness versus risk.”
“Which is why I think writing one test is the most important for each critical path. Because then you've got that really good one test for doing your thing, that really good one test for accessibility, one test for visual testing, one test for everything else.”