Stability versus trends
Let’s finish this chapter with a few words about the most recent versions, but also about trendy external technologies and libraries.
First, let’s talk about the latest versions of external libraries. Of course, we might be tempted to use the latest ones, the ones that were just released a few hours ago. It is worth remembering that bugs may appear, and a new patch version may be released in the near future if this is the case. Or not. And in this case, the bug could persist for a while. So, it’s particularly important to write tests. Imagine the comfort: you update all your dependencies, you run your test suite, and if all the lights are green (and your application is properly tested), you can be fairly sure that everything is fine.
That said, if any tests turn red because you’ve updated an external library, you’ll have to investigate to find out where this is coming from. In any case, you shouldn’t think that...