Putting off testing until you show traction can be a slippery slope. Writing tests early on can have many benefits including: better architecture/design, confidence the code performs as expected, regression testing when adding new features, ability to more quickly add new features because of the good design, etc.
If the person in charge is the stereotypical "business type", then it can be difficult/impossible to convince him/her to allow engineers to spend time doing a refactor and/or writing tests for code which was written months ago and is "working fine" because you now are showing some traction. This can easily lead to never actually getting around to writing that robust and practical test suite that is really necessary in the long term. Note that I also say the test suite should be practical (for some definition of practical which may vary from engineer to engineer). For example, 100% test coverage may not be useful, determine which parts of the code MUST be tested and which parts are just diminishing returns, etc, etc.
> If the person in charge is the stereotypical "business type", then it can be difficult/impossible to convince him/her to allow engineers to spend time doing a refactor and/or writing tests for code which was written months ago and is "working fine" because you now are showing some traction.
What I've done on a couple of occasions was to tell the nontechnical stakeholders that automated tests must be added before the web app framework (or whatever significant dependency) could be upgraded. In the context of such an upgrade, they could understand the benefit of a test suite, and they signed off on it.
If the person in charge is the stereotypical "business type", then it can be difficult/impossible to convince him/her to allow engineers to spend time doing a refactor and/or writing tests for code which was written months ago and is "working fine" because you now are showing some traction. This can easily lead to never actually getting around to writing that robust and practical test suite that is really necessary in the long term. Note that I also say the test suite should be practical (for some definition of practical which may vary from engineer to engineer). For example, 100% test coverage may not be useful, determine which parts of the code MUST be tested and which parts are just diminishing returns, etc, etc.