This weekend I gave a presentation at the Keep Austin Agile conference called “Effective Test Automation”.
It’s easy to write tests, but it’s not so easy to maintain them over time. Tests should not be a drain on your productivity, they should enhance it. However, many teams struggle just to keep their tests running—sacrificing time they could be spending developing valuable new features. How can we avoid these pitfalls? What practices and principles are effective? Which ones lead to productivity drain? This talk seeks to answer those questions and more by separating the effective practices and principles from the ineffective ones.
- Where should we focus testing efforts? Unit Tests, Integration Tests or UI Tests?
- How can we best use mocks and stubs without creating fragile tests?
- How can we instill a culture of testing?
- How should I handle test data in our tests?
- How can I use Fluent Data Builders and Anonymous Data to simplify testing?
- And much more.