Who will test your tests?
Some of us must have been on that one project, where your test suite was causing more problem than solving it. You change one thing, and hundred tests will fail. Your continuous integration build will fail randomly, but will pass if you just re-trigger it. This eventually leads to people losing all the trust on the test suite. They stop adding tests, because it’s more painful than writing production code. They start ignoring failing tests, because they fail randomly and nobody knows why. Everybody knows tests are now more trouble than help. In this talk, we will talk about some behaviours and reasons which lead to this "flaky test suite" situation. What are some development practices, which can avoid such situation. And finally we will also talk about how to fix this situation if you are already in it.
Outline/Structure of the Talk
The flow of the session will be as follows :
1) Introduction
2) Why do we write tests?
3) What are non-deterministic tests?
4) Problems of non-deterministic tests
5) Detailed causes of non-determinism and solutions for solving them
6) Strategy to resolve the existing build flakiness on your team
7) Future scope (Poka yoke - Mistake proofing ) and conclusion
The entire session will be splurged with code examples and personal bad / good experiences related to test non-determinism.
Learning Outcome
1. Understand why it is important to write good test code, similar to writing good production code.
2. Understand and appreciate the problems which can lead to flakiness of tests and how to stay away from them.
3. Understand how to strategise and resolve the issue of flaky tests on your team if you are already plagued with the disease of "flakiness".
Target Audience
Developers, Quality Analysts, Managers
Video
Links
This talk was presented by a colleague and me at XP Conference 2015, Bangalore and was voted as one of the best talks in the conference : http://xpconference.in/daily-agenda
My talk on Testing in Devops : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_lWYOp4Wkw4
Shirish spoke at Agile Pune 2014 on Application Security - The Agile Way. Link to his blog : https://medium.com/@_garbage_/application-security-the-agile-way-1441cd9cf6e6
schedule Submitted 7 years ago
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Isha Tripathi - Are we discriminating against men?
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The IT industry is evolving, and has been evolving for a while now. The one thing that has, however, not changed as drastically as one would expect within the industry are the diversity ratios. The software delivery stratosphere is still largely dominated by men. More and more organisations are now waking up to the reality of this situation, and are taking measures to fix diversity imbalance in their respective workspaces. One recurring argument against such measures to fix gender inclusivity is that these steps are discriminative against men. This, in my opinion, stems mostly from a lack of awareness about the challenges that women in the IT industry face on a daily basis. As part of this particular talk, I would like to bring to light not only some of these challenges, but also various myths about the reasons why there are fewer women in the industry and why this is a problem that we need to fix starting now.
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Naresh Jain
Joel Tosi
Ravi Kumar
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Venkatraman Lakshminarayanan
