In The Testing Weeds With Sam Phippen and Justin Searls

Episode 004: Testing

Summary

Sam Phippen, Justin Searls, and Noel Rappin spend this episode talking about the value of test-driven development (TDD) as well as its cost. They discuss the kinds of problems that developers are likely to have after they learn TDD and attempt to apply it to a large application. Learn why Rails is both great and terrible for automated testing, and how testing can influence the structure of your code.

Guests

Sam Phippen: Engineer at Digital Ocean and member of the RSpec Core Team

Justin Searls: Writes bad code effortlessly and cofounder of Test Double. Maintainer of several testing tools, and frequent speaker on test related topics.

Show Notes

• 01:30 - Intermediate Level Problems in Testing

• 04:58 - The Value of Testing

  • Boundaries by Gary Bernhardt

• 15:15 - Isolated Unit Tests

• 17:52 - Structuring Applications

• 23:13 - Test-Driven Development (TDD)

  • Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests

• 33:22 - TDD in a Smalltalk Environment

• 35:00 - Isolating Tests in a Rails Environment

  • Rake Without Rails

• 36:54 - Test Tools

  • minitest
  • Dan North: Introducing BDD
  • teenytest
  • RSpec

Tips & Resources:

Sam:

• Sandi Metz: The Magic Tricks of Testing @ Rails Conf 2013

• Test Smells

• Justin Searls: How to Stop Hating Your Test Suite @ RubyConf 2015

Justin:

Find some little problem and instead of implementing it in a Rails app, type bundle.gem and then make up a name and then practice and invent your own way of organizing code and tests so you can break things down.

Noel:

• JUnit Test Infected: Programmers Love Writing Tests

As you’re trying to test stuff, really try to focus on going back and forth between the tests and the code more rapidly than you’re probably doing so right now.

Special Guests: Justin Searls and Penelope Phippen.