Event: Bad Test, Good Test

Scottish Developers are pleased to present a talk by Seb Rose on Tuesday 12th March 2013 at the Microsoft Offices in Edinburgh.

For those of you further north, Aberdeen Developers will also be hosting this talk on Thursday 28th February at Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen. You can find more details of this on their blog - http://www.aberdeendevelopers.co.uk/post/2013/02/12/ADNUGUK-February-2013-Meeting.aspx

Participation Request: Seb is looking for those planning on attending to submit what you feel are examples of good or bad tests. You can submit them to [email protected] and they may be critiqued during the talk.

Event Details

Foundational unit testing techniques are often taken for granted, but are an essential underpinning for delivering maintainable software. The tests need to assist software development not hinder it, and to that end need to be flexible, robust, comprehensible and performant. If you find yourself fighting your test suite, then something is wrong.

In this session, we re-examine the basics of a unit test. We will work through a number of examples with continuous input from attendees. Each example will start with a test of questionable quality, and we will work through the issues till we’re happy that it’s as good as we can get it.

Although this session is not specifically about the testability of software, this will necessarily be touched upon as we consider some test cases. Examples will be written in several common languages, but knowledge of all (or any) of them is not a pre-requisite.

About the Speaker

Seb Rose is an independent software developer, trainer and coach based in the UK. He specialises in working with teams adopting and refining their agile practices, with a particular focus on delivering software through the use of examples.

He first worked as a programmer in 1980 writing applications for estate agents and solicitors in compiled BASIC on an Apple II. He has worked with many mainstream technologies since then, for many well-known companies, such as Amazon, IBM, NCR, HBOS, Standard Life and Aegon. He is a regular conference speaker (ACCU, XPDay, Agile North, Developer Day Scotland, Agile on the Beach, Lean Agile Scotland) as well as a contributing author to O’Reilly’s “97 Things Every Programmer Should Know”