Download PowerPoint | Watch video
Microtesting: How We Set Fire To The Testing Pyramid While Ensuring Confidence
Do you want to write less tests for the same amount of confidence?
Do you want to print out the testing pyramid on a dot matrix printer, take it outside and set fire to it?
How confident are you that you can survive the refactoring apocalypse without breaking your tests?
As consultants, we get to see how testing is performed across many different organisations and we have a chance to experiment with different testing strategies across multiple projects. Through this experience, we have developed a pragmatic process for setting an initial testing strategy that is as simple as possible and iterating on that strategy over time to evolve it based on how it performs. We have also settled on a style of testing that has proved to be very effective at reducing testing effort while maintaining (or even improving) confidence from our tests.
This talk will focus on some of our learnings and we will cover the different types of testing and how they interact, breaking apart the usual practice of testing all applications in the same way, the mysterious relationship between speed and confidence, how we were able to throw away the testing pyramid and a number of techniques that have worked well for us when testing our applications.
This presentation was first delivered to the 2015 Yow West conference on May 27th 2015. It was subsequently modified and delivered to the 2015 DDD Melbourne conference on August 8th 2015, the 2015 DDD Perth conference on August 29th 2015 and the 2016 NDC Sydney conference on August 4th 2016.