> If you want to reduce your test mass, the number one thing you should do is look at the tests that have never failed in a year and consider throwing them away. They are producing no information for you — or at least very little information. I feel like there is some subtlety here that most will miss. Specifically, "and consider". That is the part we are really bad at.
Those tests are helpful when you do major architectural changes, which may not happen every year. Tests also help in general development. Make some changes, then fix the tests. If you are running tests locally on your machine (and offline) how can you be sure that every time a test fails locally the failure is logged?
I've lost count of how many times I've gone into an old test suite at work and found that the tests were still passing even though the code they were testing had completely changed or been removed.
Sometimes tests are written very poorly. The codebase benefits from their removal.