Yes. I've experienced pushback from obvious fixes with requests to formally test their code for the first time.
All because it may break someone. Even when I presented a real defect based on docs/comments and fixed it. You'd think that if they truly cared about breakages they'd already have some tests for it from where I can easily start.
> All because it may break someone. Even when I presented a real defect based on docs/comments and fixed it.
It's great that you found a bug and fixed it.
The problem is, how do you know that there are no other regressions?
Code is a liability. Once you check it in, the team that owns it is responsible for it. Untested code is a liability of unknown scope. It's quite understandable why they don't want to accept someone's contributions, when the contributor isn't the one who will ultimately be dealing with any of the consequences. If you think they are being mean and lazy, imagine if the tables were reversed.
I don't accept puppies or elephants as gifts for similar reasons.
It's unfortunate that existing test coverage sucks. In this case, the best way forward should be for the team in question to improve coverage, and for you to then submit your fix + a test for it. And if they don't have budget to do this, then that sucks, but that's their call to make, and that's a signal that the project in question is abandonware.
And it's fine for a large company to have a bunch of abandonware. If it works, and produces value, the optimal amount of ongoing development effort to invest into a piece of software may, depending on the circumstances, be near-zero.
I don’t think that is necessarily unreasonable. The team may have the same constraints on themselves in that they wouldn’t touch the code either until tests are written.
I've been on every side of this conundrum. Not being allowed to improve/fix stuff is super frustrating, very demoralizing.
I can quickly recall 3 separate projects where we weren't allowed to fix stuff on new products that hadn't shipped yet (not even beta). (Oops, just thought of 2 and 1/2 more projects.)
It's hard to not treat that as beligerent, spiteful, gatekeeping, control issues. For me, half the time it absolutely was.
I've also managed legacy code bases that we dare not accidentally breathe on. Somewhere between archaeology and necromancy.
For me, when I'm in charge, project (engineering) management comes down to mitigating risk, usually by driving down the cost of change. I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir.
Alas, it's been a long time since I've been on a project that had anything resembling proper PMI, QA, Test, etc. So there's really no process or strategy to mitigate risks.
IIRC, the contemporary deliberate rejection of process is called something like the "Argyle" Methodology. Or maybe it's "Agile". Or "Argh-gargle". I don't quite remember. I can dig up those books and links, if anyone is pervously curious.
All because it may break someone. Even when I presented a real defect based on docs/comments and fixed it. You'd think that if they truly cared about breakages they'd already have some tests for it from where I can easily start.