Story Engineering culture at scale is difficult to build and even harder to maintain. In our company, we made a deliberate decision to enforce code coverage as a merge requirement — a hard gate on the CI pipeline that prevented branches from being merged unless they met a minimum threshold. We chose 80%: every new or modified class had to be covered by unit tests to at least that level. ...
This post describes how to remove class properties from the toString() method manually if you prefer not to use the Sekret compiler plugin. Kotlin’s data class toString is generated automatically to include every property defined in the primary constructor. This is convenient for debugging but problematic when some of those properties contain sensitive data — passwords, tokens, PII — that must not appear in logs, crash reports, or analytics pipelines. There is no built-in Kotlin mechanism to exclude a specific field from the generated toString while keeping it in equals, hashCode, and copy. The language does not (yet) offer an annotation equivalent to @Transient for serialization. The approaches below represent the practical trade-offs available in pure Kotlin, each with distinct implications for class semantics, mutability, and maintainability. ...