Start With the Tests That Hurt
I used to skip testing because it felt like overhead. Then a bug in a payment calculation shipped to production and I spent a weekend fixing it. That's when I stopped treating tests as a chore and started treating them as a safety net.
You don't need a 100% coverage badge or a complex test pyramid. You need a few testing habits that give you the most return for the least effort. Here's what I've found works.
Test the Critical Path First
Every codebase has a handful of functions that, if they break, cost you money or users. For me it was the pricing logic. For you it might be authentication, data validation, or the API endpoint that writes to the database.
