When I first hear that from a programmer who attended one of my training, I was speechless. It is quick in my mind of what sort of software project manager would not want unit test in their project? When I ask further in what situation his project manager said that, the reply is quite expected. His project manager actually did not say explicitly he does not want unit test, instead, when he assigned the task to the programmer, no time is allowed for unit test. When I drill down further on who provide the task's estimate in the first place, he said it was from the team.
I come to a conclusion that this is what happen when the team does not have a Definition of Done (DoD) established in the project, before any estimation process. Hence when a project manager asks an estimate from the team, the estimate he often gets is just code complete. I have seen this happen all the time, both in waterfall project or even agile project. When DoD is missing.
When come to the task delivery phase, Project Manager is often under pressure to deliver according to the promise they gave to the customer. And they took the estimate from developer to make promise. In this case, how would it be a surprise that the task duration does not cater for any testing activities? Very often the testing effort is provided by the QA team, in this case, QA would only provide estimate for all other test but not unit and integration test, since that is not in their scope.
This is another lesson to show the important of DoD, be it you are running a project using waterfall method or Agile method. Making sure no ambiguity in the communication is always the key.
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