'the right solution' is also quite a fluffy term. The reason we write unit tests and act 'professionally' is that it is proven time and time again (in my experience anyway) to be the fastest way to develop software. I keep seeing this idea of 'pressured by a deadline' which somehow means I throw away all the tools I know work, when I know that the way to meet a deadline is to stick to my principles as much as possible. I've seen the fallout when teams don't do this - the code damage lasts years, the pschological damage probably longer. Obviously there are judgement calls to be made - you can't rewrite the whole thing if you have a mess, but you can start small, and write tests for everything that you add and change.
You and I know that sticking to principles is indeed the only way to make deadlines. But I have met plenty of people who clearly either doesn't know or doesn't care. And even though I (want to) expect from my fellow developers to know this, I don't expect it from project management. I see it as my responsibility to teach them this if they don't know it.
I don't know how bad of a mess you have experience with but the one I have experience with is pretty bad. Even starting to make unit tests was hard. We're moving towards a better place but it is a bumpy ride getting there. That combined with a lot of changes consisting of single code line changes means the overhead of setting up necessary test data to hit the line in question far outweighs the time it takes to do the change. It is an investment and to do investments we need to argue the value it provides. Well and that's when we're back at our responsibility to argue that case.
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'the right solution' is also quite a fluffy term. The reason we write unit tests and act 'professionally' is that it is proven time and time again (in my experience anyway) to be the fastest way to develop software. I keep seeing this idea of 'pressured by a deadline' which somehow means I throw away all the tools I know work, when I know that the way to meet a deadline is to stick to my principles as much as possible. I've seen the fallout when teams don't do this - the code damage lasts years, the pschological damage probably longer. Obviously there are judgement calls to be made - you can't rewrite the whole thing if you have a mess, but you can start small, and write tests for everything that you add and change.
You and I know that sticking to principles is indeed the only way to make deadlines. But I have met plenty of people who clearly either doesn't know or doesn't care. And even though I (want to) expect from my fellow developers to know this, I don't expect it from project management. I see it as my responsibility to teach them this if they don't know it.
I don't know how bad of a mess you have experience with but the one I have experience with is pretty bad. Even starting to make unit tests was hard. We're moving towards a better place but it is a bumpy ride getting there. That combined with a lot of changes consisting of single code line changes means the overhead of setting up necessary test data to hit the line in question far outweighs the time it takes to do the change. It is an investment and to do investments we need to argue the value it provides. Well and that's when we're back at our responsibility to argue that case.