I don't see how that's a "tragedy", as in "an event causing great suffering, destruction, and distress, such as a serious accident, crime, or natural catastrophe".
You're also making it sound like somebody promised you that tests can prove the absence of bugs, when that was never the bargain and smart people have already told you so, probably before you were born even.
> Testing shows the presence, not the absence of bugs
If we're being pedantic, a tragedy is _a drama or literary work in which the main character is brought to ruin or suffers extreme sorrow, especially as a consequence of a tragic flaw, moral weakness, or inability to cope with unfavorable circumstances_.
If we're being pedantic, there's a second common definition of the word tragedy that does not refer to a drama or literary work, but "an event causing great suffering, destruction, and distress, such as a serious accident, crime, or natural catastrophe."
I think when you take all of the time wasted on useless tests written merely for the sake of having tests, that waste is tragic. You could be doing anything else with that time.
I am curious if there is any good way to measure that amount of waste. I agree that waste from extra and useless tests exists, but I am not convinced that waste is entirely bad.
It seems to me that waste is unavoidable with teams newer to automated testing and may simply be part of the cost of using automated tests. If that is the case then it seems better to compare the cost of bugs with no automated to cost of superfluous tests. In that comparison extra tests definitely seems like the lesser of two evils, even without hard numbers. I would prefer hard numbers because my intuition could be wrong.
You're also making it sound like somebody promised you that tests can prove the absence of bugs, when that was never the bargain and smart people have already told you so, probably before you were born even.
> Testing shows the presence, not the absence of bugs
Dijkstra (1969)