The Practical Test Pyramid

This article describes the downsides to using code coverage as a metric of code quality and offers a solution to better measure it.

Once again I’m writing a “Year in Review” post, mostly focused on professional life & tech stuff. Check 2017 here. Demonware (Activision) -> Activision Link to this heading I really enjoyed my time at Demonware, but at the beginning of the year I had an opportunity to move to another team at Activision, Data Services.

Welcome to open source vxlabs software development handbook. It contains a number of best practices for building software, generally web-based, using Python on the backend and TypeScript for the frontend. However, most of the guidelines are more broadly applicable. Important note: These are only guidelines. They were never meant to be applied dogmatically. They are great when you are starting fresh, and their intentions are good, but please do understand and adapt to your situation.

Learn about the test pyramid, including its history, purpose, advantages, and disadvantages, in this complete guide.

Kent Beck wrote SUnit to test isolated logic. The industry turned it into a coverage KPI. 400 tests green, checkout broken.

What happens when your distributed service has challenges with stampeding herds of internal requests? How do you prevent cascading failures between internal services? How might you re-architect your workflows when naive horizontal or vertical scaling reaches their respective limits? These were the challenges facing Slack engineers during their day-to-day development workflows in 2020. Multiple internal…

Discover how to combine different testing types into a reasonable strategy that matches your project.

In Joel Spolsky’s blog post “The Joel Test: 12 Steps to better Code”, he describes a test composed of twelve simple yes-no questions. For a yes you get one point. 10 points are acceptable and 12 are perfect. If you have less than 10 points, you will get in trouble with your software – sooner or later. For a quick self-check, these are the original questions: Do you use source control?

Applying Friction for Developer Productivity

Because every Wedding RSVP website needs to follow DDD, CQRS, Hexagonal Architecture, Event Sourcing, and be deployed on Lambda. - eddmann/our-wedding-website

It was April 9th 2016, and I tagged my first official release of rqlite -- two years after I actually started coding it. Since then there has been 58 releases, 277 closed issues, 416 closed pull requests, 32,785 insertions, 1954 deletions, and 100 files have changed. What is rqlite? rqlite is a lightweight, open-source, distributed…

Working with mocks is a lot like working out: if you don’t know what you’re doing then you’ll either a) don’t get the results you want or b) hurt yourse…

Unit, integration, or end-to-end tests - which should you trust? Let's explore the trade-offs and a strategy that could change how you test forever...

The “Testing Pyramid” is an industry-standard guideline for functional test case development. Love it or hate it, the Pyramid has endured since the mid-2000’s because it continues…

If you’ve been working with SwiftUI, you’ve likely noticed that your views start pretty simple but then balloon into large, unmaintainable monoliths that are hard to preview and test. While there are several techniques to keep SwiftUI views modular and reusable, some problems are architectural in nature and can only be addressed by following proven ... Read more

Tutorial article about testing node.js applications under Docker and Docker Compose. Part 1 focuses on testing a single backend API service.

Our DX survey says the feedback loop is too slow. I had a hunch our test pyramid was off. So I built an analyser to find out — and the real problem wasn't what I expected.

Are your tests helping or hindering your development process? In this article, I explore the power of the Arrange-Act-Assert pattern, a simple yet effective way to structure your tests for clarity and sustainability. Whether you’re a seasoned RSpec user or just starting out, you’ll learn how to turn natural-language statements into expressive, human-readable tests that stand the test of time.

A team without proven observability and on-call strategies will invariably suffer from reactive disruptions; mitigating outages will be painful, like finding a needle in a haystack while blindfolde…

In recent years, service architectures, especially microservices, have gained enormous popularity, yet the approach to end-to-end (E2E) testing often remains unchanged. We hear that tests verifying the operation of the entire system are crucial in the software development process, especially with distributed architectures.

In a world where code coverage rules with an iron fist, someone needs to standup for developer productivity.

Checklist, aimed to help you protect yourself from wrong usage of mocks and stubs

Learn about to apply the test pyramid for your microservices architecture

“Learning Test-Driven Development” is a fresh take on teaching TDD to curious developers. Go check it out.

Learn how to apply microservices testing concepts when writing a Java and Spring Boot application

There are a lot of challenges in the way QA and engineering work together. Many eng leaders think you shouldn't have QA. I dig in.

Some actionable steps to improve your SDLC efficiency

T.J. Maher, a QA Engineer since 1996, blogs about his transition from a manual tester to an automation developer to a software engineer in test.

T.J. Maher, a QA Engineer since 1996, blogs about his transition from a manual tester to an automation developer to a software engineer in test.