Keep your test suite passing

I once joined a project that had some automated tests and quality checks which were run automatically in a CI pipeline whenever code was pushed.

The problem was that one of the checks were failing which caused the pipeline to fail.

Because it was failing, it was ignored.

But if it's already failing and being ignored, how do you know you haven't broken something unexpectedly?

This is the value you get from automated tests that are run regularly, but if failures are being ignored, they aren't adding value or confidence the code works.

In the end, it was a small fix to get the tests and CI pipeline passing again and we made sure to keep it passing as much as possible once it was.