Palo Alto: The Role of Testing in Software Engineering, 2010-2030

Automated software testing as part of the "standard" software engineering workflow has been a contentious issue for years, viewed by some as a burden, but slowly expanding as an accepted best practice. In much the same way that version control evolved from "a good idea" to "clearly ubiquitous", I suggest that testing is well on its way to becoming generally accepted best practice. Given current developments around software engineering tooling and practice, I'll also argue that testing is a critical piece necessary to unlock the next fundamental shift in software engineering: a sustainable global open-source codebase, indexed, automatically updated, and built from head. Oh, and I'll also present some lessons learned and best practices for testing your code.

Titus Winters has spent the past six years working on Google's core C++ libraries. He's particularly interested in issues of large scale software engineer and codebase maintenance: how do we keep a codebase of over 100M lines of code consistent and flexible for the next decade? Along the way he has helped Google teams pioneer techniques to perform automated code transformations on a massive scale, and helps maintain the Google C++ Style Guide.

Level of Expertise: All