Let's Make Testing Fun Again
From WindyCityRails 2012
Presenter: Noel Rappin
“Programmers Love Writing Tests” is the subtitle of one of Kent Beck’s first articles about Test-Driven Development. I don’t think I’m alone in being drawn to TDD at first because it was fun. The quick and consistent feedback and the ability to turn complicated problems into a series of smaller problems to be solved made TDD development seem more like a game than work.
Eventually TDD became less fun. Slow tests made running test suites a cruel joke. Test code gets bulky, and is hard to refactor because, of course, tests don’t have their own tests.
Let’s fix that. We’ll show some notorious testing joy-killers, like slow tests, hard to read tests, tests that paper over bad designs rather than driving new ones. And we’ll squash them, and regain testing delight.
- Testing best practices
- "Correctness is a side effect" - Kent Beck
From @benjaminoakes:
- Kent Beck: "Programmers Love Writing Tests"
- Noel liked doing JUnit, etc
- We get satisfaction from solving problems well, but do we love writing tests?
- Do we just love saying we wrote tests?
What makes testing nice:
- Feedback: learn something about your code
- Communication (longer term)
Good Rspec Habits:
- Name by behavior
- Take small steps
- Test one thing at a time; good when your business logic changes
- Don't make too many objects (e.g. make 100 to make sure #101 acts differently)
- Slow
- Find ways to make just enough objects
- Remove noise
- Complicated setup? Maybe your code is too complicated to begin with
- Don't use Cucumber for unit tests
- Make single assertions... when it makes sense
