Agile Thoughts

The smallest floor of the pyramid is the top as it's much narrower than the spacious bottom. While the top only has room for a ping pong table and a TV, the bottom has room for a soccer field or two.

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The smallest floor of the pyramid is the top as it’s much narrower than the spacious bottom. While the top only has room for a ping pong table and a TV, the bottom has room for a soccer field or two. We fill this spacious floor with microtests: unit tests that check that every public function of every class is working as the developer designed it. Micro tests check fine grain behavior of that function, testing that the function performs correctly for different inputs. Inputs which are necessary for the product to operate correctly. Each public function in the entire Code base should have their own micro test just as the electronic manufacturing industry discovered more than 30 years ago, to only use chips and electrical components that are unit tested before assembling a product. Executing Microtests don’t require deployment of the app, external services, network connections, file systems, or database. The most effective way to develop microtests are having the developers build them while writing the code using a practice called Test Driven Development, a practice we’ll cover in a later podcast. Tools for building automated micro tests (also known as unit tests) are: JUnit, NUnit, GTest, Jasmine, Mocha Chai, UTPLSql, TST, TSqlT, and more. Next episode we’ll head to the penthouse of our pyramid and talk about macro tests.

To have sustainable test automation, there is this idea that you need two levels of testing: macrotests, and microstests.

The post 001 Build a Solid Pyramid first appeared on Agile Thoughts.

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To have sustainable test automation, there is this idea that you need two levels of testing: macrotests, and microstests. Now imagine a pyramid or triangle made of two floors. Microtests are at the bottom and most numerous in quantity, and the top which is the smallest part of the triangle or pyramid, making macrotests the least in number. Macrotests require part or all of the application to be deployed. Microtests are unit tests to check that the code works as the developer intended. Its important to follow the geometry of the test pyramid because microtests are high value with low cost, so we can afford to build and maintain thousands of them, where macro tests although valuable too, are high cost. When we build macrotests we need to be certain we’re using them the right way. We’ll talk More on these levels in the next episodes of Agile Thoughts and reveal a secret level hidden in the test pyramid.