👋 Hello, this is Valentina with the free edition of the Optivem Journal. I help Engineering Leaders & Senior Software Developers apply TDD in Legacy Code.
When I started my career in software development, I thought I was surrounded by the wrong people.
Nobody wanted to write tests.
Nobody cared about clean code.
Every conversation about improving the codebase turned into an argument.
I remember thinking:
“If I just join a better company, things will be different.”
The next company was supposed to be different
I moved to another company.
Surely this time it would be different.
More experienced developers.
Better engineers.
Except...
The same problems were there.
“Tests are a waste of time.”
“We’ll clean up the code later.”
“We have always done it this way.”
Being a Senior Developer didn’t change anything
As a Senior Developer, I though:
“Now I can finally influence how we build software.”
We would write better code.
We would add tests.
We would stop rushing changes into production.
I was wrong.
Even getting people to write one test was a battle.
“Why would we write twice as much code?”
“Now we have to maintain the application code and all the tests too?”
The smaller company as a Tech Lead
The next move was to a smaller company, as a Team Lead.
This time I did things differently.
I stopped waiting for permission. In my own time, over several months, I built a Clean Architecture template — layered, testable, with unit tests already in place.
When I recruited developers for the team, I stopped screening only for years of experience. I screened for whether they cared about quality.
Then I built the first module with the template myself, end to end, so there was something real to point at.
And then I trained the team to do it the same way.
Six months later
Within six months, that team had shipped more features than the “senior” developers at my previous companies had managed in years.
Same industry. Same kind of problems.
The difference wasn’t that these developers were smarter. It was that nobody had to be convinced. The template made the right way the easy way, the hiring made the standard shared, and the training made it something the whole team could do — not something one person kept arguing for.
That’s what I had been getting wrong for years.
You don’t change a team by caring harder than everyone else. You change it by building the thing, showing it works, and bringing people with you.
The template was what made that possible. So that’s what I want to show you how to design.
Join the live training session:
Clean Architecture for Backend Developers
🗓 Aug 26
⏰ 5:00–6:30 PM (CEST)
The hardest part of TDD isn't writing tests - it's the people.
When you recruited developers for your team, did you have the final word on recruitment? What level of involvement and decision making did other company stakeholders have?