Are Your Tests Slowing You Down?

How a Developer Productivity Engineering (DPE) approach can speed up writing, running and debugging tests.

Abstract

Testing is a Good Thing, right? Especially automated testing. But "Good things come to those who wait" is not something that's going to appeal to the busy developer. You want results, and you want them now. You're in The Zone working on a problem, and the last thing you want is to break your flow wrestling with your testing framework or waiting for the tests to finish running.

More code means more tests. More coverage means more tests. More tests mean more time. Time that you want to spend being productive, creative, innovative. How can you balance the need for quality with the need for speed?

In this talk, Trisha will identify issues that slow down developers when writing, running and debugging tests, and look at tools that can help developers with each of these problems. There will be live coding, analysis of social media poll results, an overview of solutions in this space, "best practice" recommendations, and machine learning will be mentioned at some point.

Video

I also gave the presentation at the Virtual Java User Group, it's slightly more up to date, and it's a remote presentation which is sometimes easier to follow than a "real life" conference recording.

Slides

Resources

I read a LOT, and watched a bunch of videos, while I was preparing this talk.

Writing Tests

IntelliJ IDEA tips for writing code

Using ML & AI

Debugging / Troubleshooting Tests

Flaky tests

Running tests

Cleaning up your test suite

General information about testing

Other

Books & courses

Attributions

If you like my stuff, buy my books and/or subscribe to my substack!