LSCC Talks #6

Important: You must register at https://skillsmatter.com/meetups/6558-how-to-name-things-a-swiss-army-knife-for-readable-tests to attend this talk.

The sixth iteration of our talks is on readability and naming.

The event will consist of two half-hour talks and two five-minute lightning talks, followed by a trip to the pub for further discussion.

How to Name Things: the solution to the hardest problem in programming, by Peter Hilton

Developers can get better at their craft by learning from the great writers who mastered theirs. Writing software isn’t the same as writing a novel, but there are parallels. Besides, advice from writers is better because writers have been struggling with their craft for many centuries, not just a few decades. It’s better-written as well. This talk shares great writers’ best advice for coders: Stephen King on refactoring, Anne Rice on development hardware, Hemingway on modelling with personas, and Neil Gaiman on everything.

A swiss army knife for readable tests, by Adam Kosiński

By now hopefully most of the developers know tests are worth writing. Unfortunately, sometimes their quality leaves a lot to be desired. Tests produced are tightly coupled, testing wrong things with wrong set of assertions.

There are many discussions addressing the questions like "What to test" and "How to test". But there is one equally important - "How to write test someone else can read". While there is no tool on the world that would do the former for you, the latter can be vastly improved with right set of techniques, tricks and libraries. If we are committing to writing tests, we might as well get the most of it.

That is what this talk will be about: ideas and patterns to produce clean, readable and developer-friendly tests. We will look deep into technical details, some of which include: patterns for building your test objects, prettifying test output or defining descriptive assertions.

Important: You must register at https://skillsmatter.com/meetups/6558-how-to-name-things-a-swiss-army-knife-for-readable-tests to attend this talk.