March 15, 2007

Designing for Testability

Today, Alexandru and I made our presentation at QCon. We split the talk in two parts: Alexandru covered a section we called "Three TestNG features that you will like" and I followed with a brand new presentation entitled "Designing for Testability", which I made purposely non-TestNG specific.

As you probably guessed, a lot of the ideas discussed in this presentation are covered in greater lengths in our upcoming book.

Here are some of the topics I covered:

  • Designing for Testability can sometimes be at odds with well-established software engineering practices, such as certain design patterns and extreme encapsulation. You need to be ready to question your beliefs.
  • You should avoid using statics, and there are some very valuable frameworks that make this very easy (Guice and Spring, to name two).
  • Test-Driven Development does not necessarily lead to code that is better designed, and is best used to expose junior programmers to testing.
As for the conference, I'm enjoying it quite a bit: the location is absolutely terrific and it's nice to be able to attend non-Java tracks, for a change. Hats off to Floyd, Alexandru and the rest of the crew for a top-notch conference!

Posted by cedric at March 15, 2007 12:24 PM

Comments

Cedric - were the presentations recorded for podcasting at all? Would be great to here them...

Posted by: Mark Derricutt at March 15, 2007 01:18 PM

Cédric, about avoiding statics - if you were using tools (or a language) that let you temporarily override what a static method does, would you still say that you should avoid statics?

If so, why?

The reason for my question is that I think you don't need to write testable code in a way that is any harder to read than untestable code; especially if your tools are good. In Java, that probably means AOP; in Lisp, it probably means, well, normal Lisp.

Posted by: Ricky Clarkson at March 15, 2007 07:02 PM

Mark,

Yes, most sessions at QCon were recorded for podcasting. They should appear on InfoQ over the next couple of months (although I know nothing about the schedule).

Cédric, glad to hear that you enjoyed the conference! Hope to see you next year.

Posted by: Jacob Tjornholm at March 19, 2007 02:24 AM

Thanks for blogging about QCon! I just wanted to let you know that we quoted and linked from this entry on the over all QCon 2007 blogger's key takeaway points and lessons learned article: http://www.infoq.com/articles/qcon-2007-bloggers-summary

Feel free to link to it and of course blogging about this articles existence would help even more people learn from your and other bloggers takeaways.

Thanks again!

Diana
InfoQ/QCon

Posted by: diana plesa at March 22, 2007 03:09 AM

I hope everything went off swimmingly!

Posted by: narik at April 9, 2007 10:55 PM
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