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Testing is the practice of systematically checking if code functions as intended.
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Hillel Wayne buttondown.email

I have complicated feelings about TDD

logged by jerodsanto 2022-09-13T18:45:00Z #testing

Hillel Wayne:

I practice “weak TDD”, which just means “writing tests before code, in short feedback cycles”. This is sometimes derogatively referred to as “test-first”. Strong TDD follows a much stricter “red-green-refactor” cycle…

Turns out I also practice “weak TDD” most of the time, but I didn’t know there was a (derogatory) term for it. In this post, Hillel lays out why he does weak TDD and why he doesn’t do strong TDD. Oh, and stick around to the end to learn why he thinks TDD hasn’t conquered the world…

Philip Walton philipwalton.com

Performant A/B testing with Cloudflare workers

logged by jerodsanto 2022-07-07T14:02:00Z #performance +2

Philip Walton:

While most teams I talk to would love to be able to run A/B tests to accurately assess the performance impact of certain changes, the problem is pretty much every popular A/B testing tool on the market has such a negative impact on load performance that they’re essentially unusable for this purpose.

If you’re just trying to determine which of two marketing headlines converts better, then perhaps this performance difference isn’t so bad. But if you’re wanting to run an A/B test to determine whether inlining your CSS in the <head> of your pages will improve your FCP, well, those popular A/B testing tools are just not going to cut it.

He goes on to describe his process for running performant A/B tests on his static site using Cloudflare workers to swap in/out his experiments.

Tooling doordash.engineering

Filibuster – automating resilience testing of microservice applications

logged by jerodsanto via apalo 2022-06-06T21:50:00Z #tooling +1

Christopher Meiklejohn has been working for two years on developing an automated resilience testing tool called Filibuster and was able to test it out at DoorDash during his research internship:

Access to DoorDash’s real-world industrial microservice application was extremely valuable both to ensure that Filibuster’s design matches how microservice applications are developed today and to influence future features that I would not have identified in a lab setting.

The results were pretty good! Maybe we won’t need chaos monkeys as tools like Filibuster advance?

In short, Filibuster can identify many of the technical resilience issues that exist in applications earlier, at the time of development, without testing in production as required in more traditional chaos engineering techniques.

Testing paperless.blog

Start test names with “should”

logged by jerodsanto 2022-06-06T14:51:00Z #testing +1

Victor Engmark thinks we should start test names with “should” for a handful of reasons, here’s a few:

  • It removes redundancy, because the function name should already be in the call stack.
  • It is falsifiable, a person reviewing the test can decide to which degree the name agrees with the actual test.
  • It encourages testing one property of the function per test

I don’t disagree, but I like to take it a step further: Let the “should” be implied by the rest of the test name.

Instead of: should replace children when updating instance

I prefer: replaces children when updating instances

Instead of: should apply discount when total cost exceeds 100 dollars

I prefer: applies discount when total cost exceeds 100 dollars

Most of Victor’s reasons for using “should” still apply with this format, but it’s less verbose and more accurately describes the software working as expected when the tests pass.

Engineering at Meta Icon Engineering at Meta

Meta is transferring Jest to the OpenJS Foundation

logged by jerodsanto 2022-05-12T14:45:00Z #oss +2

Good for them (and us)! But what does that mean in practice?

Over the next few months, we’ll be completing the OpenJS Foundation’s incubation program checklist, including transferring the Jest domain, repo, website, and other assets to OpenJS. We’ll also be updating the code of conduct and contributor license agreement.

Additionally, as part of this move, we will be publishing a project charter and creating new governance policies that will document the process for gaining commit access, as well as our leadership selection process.

Next up: React?! A guy can dream…

Ship It! Ship It! #45

Swiss Quality Assurance

Play
Featuring Pia Wiedermayer Featuring Gerhard Lazu 2022-03-23T19:00:00Z #ops +2
🎧 9,584

Pia Wiedermayer, Lead QA at Zühlke, is talking with Gerhard today about software quality. If the name sounds familiar, check out episode 28. Thank you Romano for the introduction 👋🏻

Do you remember the last time that you used an app, whether it was in the browser or on your mobile, and everything just worked? What about that intuitive feel, snappiness and you achieving the task that you intended to without feeling that you are fighting tech? Experiences like those take a lot of effort across multiple disciplines. They are designed, built and maintained over long periods of time. It all starts with people like Pia that really care about quality. It’s so much more than just automated testing…

Richard Hipp sqlite.org

How SQLite is tested

logged by adamstac 2021-12-06T22:53:11Z #sqlite +1

This hit my radar a few times in the past year – this week, and then most recently a few months back when we had Richard Hipp on The Changelog (again) – but, I didn’t post it to the newsfeed.

Here’s what’s interesting about the SQLite test suite – it’s their secret sauce…the sustaining enablement of building a support business around SQLite. Here’s a direct quote from Richard Hipp in that episode.

Originally we thought we were gonna sell this and make money from it, and that’s how we were gonna support ongoing development. That didn’t really play out, nobody ever bought it. It does sort of become our business value, our intellectual property. I mean, you can take the SQLite code and fork it and start your own thing…but you don’t have the full test suite. You’ve got a lot of tests, but not all of them. So we’ve got a little bit of advantage over you there.

Click here to play that episode from this quote.

Jacob Kaplan-Moss jacobian.org

An introduction to work sample tests

logged by jerodsanto 2021-12-06T15:32:00Z #career +1

Jacob Kaplan-Moss, who has been writing a lot about good interview questions and how to hire well:

Work sample tests are an exercise, a simulation, a small slice of real day-to-day work that we ask candidates to perform. They’re practical, hands-on, and very close or even identical to actual tasks the person would perform if hired. They’re also small, constrained, and simplified enough to be fair to include in a job selection process.

To give you a more concrete idea of what I’m talking about, here are several examples of work sample tests I’ve used…

And just in case you think he’s prescribing whiteboarding…

However, work sample tests are also a minefield: the space is littered with silly practices like whiteboarding, FizzBuzz, Leetcode, and “reverse a linked list”-style bullshit. The point of this series is to separate these silly practices from the good ones and to give you a framework and several examples to use in your hiring rounds.

James Sinclair jrsinclair.com

How not to write property tests in JavaScript

logged by jrsinclair 2021-11-24T17:41:00Z #testing +1

Property-based tests give us more confidence in our code. They’re great at catching edge-cases we may not have thought of otherwise. But this confidence comes at a cost. Property tests take more effort to write. They force you to think hard about what the code is doing, and what its expected behaviour should be. It’s hard work. And on top of that, running 100+ tests is always going to take longer than running 3–5 example-based tests. This cost is real, and it raises the question:

How do we keep ourselves from over-specifying or writing unnecessary tests?

Alexander Sulim sul.im

Why do I write tests?

logged by soulim 2021-09-28T14:28:00Z #testing

Recently I discovered additional reasons to write tests for my code! Besides obvious and well-known ones described in books and many blog posts, I realized that the process of writing tests has also psychological effects for me. These effects are especially helpful in cases of hotfixes that need to be deployed as soon as possible.

Ship It! Ship It! #16

Optimize for smoothness not speed

Play
Featuring Justin Searls Featuring Gerhard Lazu 2021-08-25T11:00:00Z #ops +3
🎧 5,306

This week Gerhard is joined by Justin Searls, Test Double co-founder and CTO. Also a 🐞 magnet. They talk about how to deal with the pressure of shipping faster, why you should optimize for smoothness not speed, and why focusing on consistency is key. Understanding the real why behind what you do is also important. There’s a lot more to it, as its a nuanced and complex discussion, and well worth your time.

Expect a decade of learnings compressed into one hour, as well as disagreements on some ops and infrastructure topics — all good fun. In the show notes, you will find Gerhard’s favorite conference talks Justin gave a few years back.

Startups github.com

GrowthBook – an open source A/B testing platform

logged by jerodsanto 2021-08-09T15:36:00Z #startups +1

The top 1% of companies spend thousands of hours building their own A/B testing platforms in-house. The other 99% are left paying for expensive 3rd party SaaS tools or hacking together unmaintained open source libraries.

Growth Book gives you the flexibility and power of a fully-featured in-house A/B testing platform without needing to build it yourself.

GrowthBook – an open source A/B testing platform

rainerhahnekamp rainerhahnekamp.com

Protractor is dead, long live Cypress

logged by jerodsanto via rainerhahnekamp 2021-08-09T14:26:00Z #angular +2

Rainer Hahnekamp:

On 24th April 2021, Angular announced the deprecation of their E2E testing tool protractor. It was unclear if there will be a successor or if Angular delegates this to its users. In this article, I will provide a short overview over the differences between the various E2E frameworks, and argue why you should use Cypress.

I’ve heard nothing but high praise of Cypress and thoroughly enjoyed our conversation with Gleb Bahmutov when he joined us on JS Party.

Katie Hockman blog.golang.org

Go's fuzzing effort now in beta

logged by jerodsanto 2021-06-07T13:53:00Z #go +2

We first talked fuzzing with Katie Hockman back in August of 2020. Fast-forward 10 months and native fuzzing in Go is ready for beta testing! Here’s Katie explaining fuzzing, for the uninitiated:

Fuzzing is a type of automated testing which continuously manipulates inputs to a program to find issues such as panics or bugs. These semi-random data mutations can discover new code coverage that existing unit tests may miss, and uncover edge case bugs which would otherwise go unnoticed. Since fuzzing can reach these edge cases, fuzz testing is particularly valuable for finding security exploits and vulnerabilities.

It looks like the feature won’t be landing in Go 1.17, but they’re planning on it sometime after that. Either way, you can use fuzzing today on its development branch.

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