Friday, October 31, 2008

Talk at XPSD Thrusday Nov 6th

we are giving a talk on approval tests at XPSD Thursday Nov 6th at 6pm, here's the teaser...

Approval Based Tests

Write your code, run it, see that it works. This is a familiar process to all programmers. The addition of 1 line of code can now make that a repeatable automated regression test!

Well tested code has been shown, over and over, to improve the quality and maintainability of software. Yet most projects are not well tested. Why is this? Too often programmers feel that testing imposes too high of an overhead on writing code.

In this talk, our goal is to make it easier and faster for you to write unit tests.

We will show how using approvals, in addition to asserts, will great increase not only the ease and speed of writing a test, but the completeness and maintainability of those tests; bridging the gap between people who don't write tests, and test driven developers.

"I feel like I have to write my code twice…" Right now, unit tests impose a difficult step upfront of knowing exactly what you want. Asserting this outcome then becomes cumbersome the more robust & detailed it is. After that, maintaining the test becomes equally cumbersome. Because of this, tests either do not get written, or get discarded, leaving untested code which is fragile, error prone and leads to the nightmare of maintenance so many experience.

After this talk, you should find yourself spending less time writing tests, yet having better tested code, a proven way to increase successfulness of your software.

"After I heard Dan & Llewellyn talk about approval tests, I tried it out… in the first 4 minutes I was testing my code" - C. Monkey

"I find myself writing more code just so I can write more approval tests!" - Script Kiddie

"All my life I'd sought approval from other developers, now I can approve on my own" – Noself E. Steam

"With all the time I saved, I actually learned to talk to women" - Mystery

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