Pragmatic unit testing

Unit testing is a vast topic. The industry has accumulated a huge amount of information about it during the past two decades. However, not all unit testing practices yield equal results. Some of them are valuable and contribute a lot to the overall software quality. Others result in brittle tests: tests that raise many false alarms and dilute your ability to spot the problem in case something goes wrong. It is important for you as a developer to know which practices provide the best return on your efforts.

This talk targets developers who are familiar with unit testing, already mastered all the basics around it and want to take their unit testing skills to the next level. The audience will learn how to get the most out of their unit test suite.

The topics Vladimir will cover include:

• what makes a test valuable;
• test-induced design damage and how to avoid it;
• how to choose which parts of the code deserve 100% or close to 100% test coverage and which can be left mostly uncovered by unit tests;
• why using mocks in tests is almost never a good idea.