Today I attended a Test Automation workshop (@ Wintec House) run in conjunction with Callaghan Innovation & Hypr. It was a hands-on workshop where we covered some theory, did some activities that reinforced the theory and finished off with some sample code exercises.
Some key learnings from the workshop where:
- The shape of your testing should look more like a pyramid rather than an ice cream cone
- Small batches of work are far more efficient to get through the development cycle then large batches
- Test automation is best done incrementally with a refactor, you need only start with the code you are changing
- Specification by Example is a collaborative approach to defining requirements and business-oriented functional tests for software products based on capturing and illustrating requirements using realistic examples instead of abstract statements
- It's a long road to adding testing to your existing code base, it can take upwards of a year or more to get full coverage
- Where possible use your IDE to automatically refactor, it's much safer than "find and replace"
- The difference between Fakes & Mocks in testing - A fake has the same behavior as the thing that it replaces, a mock has a set of expectations about calls that are made. If these expectations are not met, the test fails