Testing Pyramid vs... Testing Trophy?

I was honored to chat to a bunch of professional QA people last night about Testing Pyramid and Consequences, details on a previous blog post. People last night seemed interested and curious in the "Testing Trophy" concept. That is, in contrast to the Testing Pyramid, tests should be mostly integration, with a few UI and unit tests. In this way we get the most business value for each test we write.

I'm a fan of the Testing Pyramid (lots of unit tests), however I'm an even bigger fan of paying really close attention to business value. Tests aren't free, and they aren't cheap! They can have bugs, and can be over-designed, so they function as "change detector" as opposed to a safety net.

From Kent C Dodds:

"Testing Trophy

A general guide for the return on investment of the different forms of testing with regards to testing JavaScript applications.

- End to end: Cypress
- Integration, Unit: Jest
- Static: Flow, ESLint"

From @kentcdodds tweet

new talk: Testing Pyramid and Consequences

I'm giving a new talk!  This Wednesday in Pasadena for the LA Software Testing meetup, and again soon in Santa Monica at the Testable LA meetup.

The traditional testing pyramid is a useful tool for investing in tests which deliver business value... but there are a lot of subtleties. In this talk I'll highlight each area of the Pyramid, then discuss extensions and variations, so that we all can more fully deliver wonderful quality code, quickly!

Slides on google docs: Testing Pyramid and Consequences

Here's a recording from the LA Software Testing meetup.

Resources:

• Meetups: Testable LA, LA Software Testing
• Brian Okken - Test and Code podcast

• Martin Fowler - Practical Test Pyramid article
• Books: Refactoring, NoSQL Distilled
• Lisa Crispin: Agile Testing books
• Safari Online books, training videos

tradeoffs of having a distributed company

if y'all have a company and are considering making it mostly remote/distributed, track down talks by Mitchell "Hashicorp" Hashimoto. His co makes Vagrant and Terraform and Packer and Vault. Anyway he gave a talk in which he talked about having a mostly-distributed company. He said a lot of things were much cheaper (renting offices), but a lot of things were more expensive/awkward (per-site licensing for video equipment). Overall he called it "a wash"

Here's the talk, recorded at Replicated in Culver City, CA => https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iV5doaYReyU