Preparing Businesses to Make Lateral Changes: Unit Tests
What I find more common is for the business to be unprepared to make lateral changes to a product. Even rational unit tests are a medium term investment. You need to spend time developing features customers don’t see, and apply those tools for some time, to see quality differences. That can be difficult to justify in a number fairly normal business scenarios (low cashflow/reserves, high tech debt/regret, etc.).
To help offset the cost (and delayed benefits), I’ve always suggested phasing in unit test strategically. Pick a module or cross-section of the product that is suffering from bugs that customers see (i.e., affecting revenue) and add the minimum viable tests to that. Repeat as needed, and within months/years, you’ll have coverage that fits the business needs well.