An antipattern is a recurring negative solution to a problem:
- Because it's a solution to a problem, it tends to stick around after it's implemented. If it didn't solve a problem, it would be thrown out.
- Because it recurs, it gets implemented -- and reimplemented -- by developers in a wide variety of settings.
- Because it's negative, it's not the optimal solution
The combination of these three elements is what makes antipatterns so troublesome.
Learning rspec, jasmine etc is the easiest part of testing. Writing good tests is the hard part. In this workshop, I am going to presents some common testing antipatterns and show how to resolve them.
These are some of the antipatterns we will be discussing today:
- Tests that only check for the expected result, not the boundaries and exceptions - Happy Path
- Test that runs incredibly slow. When developers kick it off, they have time to go to the bathroom, grab a smoke, or worse, kick the test off before they go home at the end of the day - Slow pokes
- Tests that are hard to figure out what is being tested - Obscure Tests
- Tests that break when they shouldn't - Fragile Tests
- Tests that pass and fail without you changing anything - Erratic Tests
- Test code that is not well refactored as the production code - Second Class Citizen
- Tests that require branches in production code - Test Hooks