The Value of Unit Tests
Mar 2, 2025
I was asked by a friend recently about the purpose of unit tests in a project. I’ve written a little about this in the past, both very recently when talking about Swiss Cheese / Layered Testing Cake and I specifically didn’t speak it about it all when talking about The Value of Automation, but this question came from a developer and I wanted to try to answer the question directly.
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Layered Testing Cake
Feb 26, 2025
About a year and a half ago, I wrote about the desire for 100% coverage. This topic came up again recently when a release was found to contain a bug. It was before it was shipped, but it was pretty close.
And so the questions begin.
Why didn’t testing find this sooner? How do we make our release tests more rigorous? The first question is absolutely the right question to be asking.
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Determinism in Tests
Feb 17, 2025
Software is deterministic. It’s a computer program, after all. It’s a series of instructions that, when executed, will always produce the same output given the same input. Our inputs might be literal inputs, or might be actions. There are also implied inputs that make up the test environment. One example might be available disk space.
Testing is a learning activity, where for a given set of inputs we learn about the output.
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What Veganism can teach FOSS
Feb 5, 2025
I recently attended FOSDEM 2025, and was asked how it was I could possibly use Google Pay on my phone when I was clearly a vocal proponent of Free & Open-Source Software (FOSS). I said that believing in FOSS didn’t mean I needed to be uncompromising, and told a story about veganism.
Disclaimer: I don’t really know much about veganism. I try to live a low-meat diet. Don’t take anything in this post as an affront to veganism - any offence is very much not intended.
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Language is Awesome
Nov 9, 2024
I was listening to the kids talking the other day. Some of the gibberish they were saying wasn’t English. Some of them weren’t words at all. And yet, they understood each other, and I understood most of it too.
Language is awesome. It’s interesting. It’s really local.
I speak English. English is one of the most widely spoken languages on the planet. Yet 85% of the world’s population don’t speak it.
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That time I wanted 100% test coverage
May 4, 2024
In May 2019, filling in a timesheet, I was wondering if I’d actually done the correct number of hours. My company was a consultancy, so all hours needed to be recorded. It also ran a flexible working policy, so you didn’t fixed working patterns or a fixed number of hours in a day, so long as it remains compatible with your team and you get all of your hours done eventually.
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QE Babble - Speed vs Quality (21 Feb 2024)
Feb 27, 2024
In my third week working at Doccla, the testers (Rachel and I) tuned into a session of QE Babble (available on LinkedIn and Meetup, although the latter links back to the former), hoping to get answers to one of the industry’s most pressing problems. The panel were asked a number of questions, and gave answers in turn. Whilst naturally, nobody had a silver bullet, there were some general themes that we liked.
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Marking your own work
Jan 30, 2024
I recently read an essay written by my sister. She’s on her second or third degree, training to become a teacher. She’s worked in education for over a decade, but until I proof-read her recent essay, I had no worldly clue how much I didn’t know about learning.
I recently wrote about Learning about Learning - how I manage the list of things I want to learn, and how I structure that time.
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Continuous Learning about Learning
Jan 15, 2024
I spent time in 2020 focussing on learning teaching skills. I knew that I already taught people both at work and in the testing community, but I was also acutely aware that there’s an entire industry of trained pedagogues out there, with actual proper skills that I didn’t have, and I could certainly learn to improve. There’s probably another post in what I learned, but lately I’m trying to focus on being more aware of my learning.
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Naming Things isn't hard, but it's local
Jan 11, 2024
People say that naming things is hard. This isn’t a problem I’ve had. Coming up with a repo name for a containerised test environment repository is easy. Coming up with a name for a test harness is easy.
What I can’t do is conjure agreement on names for the kinds of tests that exist.
My New Year’s resolution is stop caring about it, and to convince other people to stop caring about it too.
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