At Voices that Matter, I was really honored when Matt Knox named my Testing is Overrated talk as one of the 5 great Ruby talks of the last year, alongside names like DHH and Avi Bryant.
It’s true that the title is a little off-putting, but I think the core message is sound: as programmers, we spend too much time thinking about programmatic testing and not enough thinking about other ways to ensure code quality.
(Maybe if I’d called it Test All the Fucking Ways I’d have started a meme, too…)
If you missed the talk, InfoQ should be putting the video up on their website sometime before the heat death of the universe.
In the meanwhile, you can check out the slides….
and read the extensive handout I made….
Would you like me to give a version of this talk to your conference? I would love to do it again! Contact me.
Your talk was good. And I especially enjoy your handouts.
I stole that idea from Edward Tufte!
Just wanted to comment on testing tests. The best way to do that automatically is to write them first and to only write the code that passes the test(s). With existing code to test, I’ve found deleting code that implements a requirement is a good way to make sure the tests will fail as expected.
That’s a good start, but it’s not really enough, because you need to make sure you’re testing corner cases and error conditions. That’s where programmatic tests will really save you from bugs, but it doesn’t come for free.
I think it’s pretty easy to write a test and make it pass. Making sure all the corner cases are covered is really hard. Check out the chapter on developer testing in Code Complete for more detailed examples.
Congrats on the well-deserved recognition, Luke.