Recent talks

I recently gave a couple of conference talks:

  • 2015 Yow! West conference; joint presentation with Matt Davies on Microtesting:

    • 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.

    • Slides published to GitHub
    • There will be a video, I’ll link to it from the GitHub when it’s published
  • 2015 ANZ Coders virtual conference; presentation on Applying useful testing patterns using TestStack.Dossier:

    • The Object Mother, Test Data Builder, Anonymous Variable/Value, equivalence class and constrained non-determinism patterns/concepts can help you make your tests more readable/meaningful, more terse and more maintainable when used in the right way.

      This talk will explain why and where the aforementioned patterns are useful and the advantages they can bring and show examples in code using a library I recently released called TestStack.Dossier.

    • Slides published to GitHub
    • Video