Developer Testing Tricks

• present a set of testing related situations and experience in solving a number of issues
• raise the audiences’ awareness over effective ways of communicating through tests
• emphasize skills and courage to solve testing issues

Most of the examples will use rspec (and some using test/unit) and focus on testing strategies in different situations. The concepts are applicable to rspec and test/unit or derivative technologies.

• Empirical software development – Automated vs Manual testing
• When to do automated testing
• Developer vs Customer Acceptance tests
• Tests as communication (specifications and examples)

• The lifecycle of a test and how testing strategies/refactorings change over the life of the test
  • TDDBrian Takita worked at Pivotal Labs 3 years doing TDD with Rails and Ruby. He works with some of the best talent in the software development industry. Brian has also worked on a number of open source projects including:
• rspec (core contributor)
• SeleniumrcFu plugin
• RR mock framework
• Desert plugin framework
  • Regression Test
  • Death of the Test

• Code coverage vs Logical coverage

• The parts of a test and how to use each part to communicate the intent, situation, and conditions of the test.
  • Preconditions
  • Execution
  • Postconditions

• Spec/Test tools for organization
  • Example names (Test::Unit method names)
  • Using before and after callbacks to help set up your preconditions and postconditions (Test::Unit #setup and #teardown methods)
  • Nested describes (Test::Unit subclassing)
  • Shared Behaviour (Modules)
  • “Macros” (class methods that generate tests a la Shoulda)

• Different ways to organize test/specs with their advantages/disadvantages
  • One ExampleGroup (TestCase) per situation
  • One Example (test) per condition
  • One Example testing several conditions
  • Variable names to check different scenarios

• Unit Testing and Functional Testing
  • What are the goals of each approach
  • Can you do just functional testing? (it depends)
  • Your unit can be more than one object (Unit of concern)

• Productivity
  • TDD rhythm
  • Test execution time (Speed matters)
    • Tools to improve execution time

• Mocks and their advantages / disadvantages
  • Do mocks make your test simpler or more complicated?
  • Prefer to use the front door (state based testing)
  • When are mock the only reliable way to test something
  • When do they make more sense to use that state based testing
  • When do they not make more sense to use that state based testing
  • Using mocks to clarify the test (even state based tests)
  • Using the mock proxy pattern to get mock validations while calling the real method

• Rails fixtures
  • Best practices for using fixtures
  • Testing your fixtures
• Object Mother

• Test fragility
• Test consolidation / expansion

• How to make refactorings easier with tests

• Selenium and where it makes sense
• Selenium and where it makes sense
  • Making your Selenium tests easy to write and read using a DSL
  • Handling Selenium concurrency

• Testing Javascript
  • Testing rjs
  • JSunit

• Special situations
  • Testing concurrency
  • Testing already implemented code (legacy apps)
  • Client/server testing with Ajax