“Going nowhere fast” by Nathan
The session on Faster Tests (led by David) was interesting, at least to the extend that it was quite clear that we at Algodeal are not doing too bad indeed (Douglas Squirrel from youDevise is another one that seems to be quite cerebral about tests and builds).
By looking that the various options discussed to get tests faster, I think it’s fair to say that the only way to really speed up tests is by compromising their integrity, at least to a level. In a way, to make tests faster, you’ve got to face reality and move away from their ideal abstraction (very reminiscent of Joel Spolsky’s Law of Leaky Abstractions). The only question is: how confident are you that those (slightly compromised) tests actually test something useful?
This leads to the conclusion that we only keep long integration tests because it is difficult for us to really understand what’s going on. If we did have an excellent understanding, we would have unit tests instead. And, interestingly, as we progress in our project, we find ways to convert integration tests into unit tests. In other words, we better understand what’s going on.
Also, check out my notes on the session on Mock Objects.
“Quite cerebral” is not what my colleagues say when the build farm falls over! [grin] Would be happy to talk with interested people about faster tests and bigger (and smaller) CI farms: douglas followed by dot then squirrel followed by at, finally youdevise.com.