Episode 33: Back in the Testing Weeds with Sam Phippen and Justin Searls

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• Sam Phippen: Tech Lead at DigitalOcean and member of the RSpec Core Team
• Justin Searls: Co-founder of Test Double

I'm back in the testing weeds with Sam Phippen, lead maintainer for RSpec-Rails, and Justin Searls, co-founder of Test Double and author of testdouble.js. We talk about long-running test suites: are they bad, or just misunderstood? Does parallel CI solve all testing speed problems, or just some of them? Then we move to a wider view, what does it mean to test your library as part of a larger ecosystem. And, how can we leverage coverage or CI information to make for more useful testing tools over the lifetime of a project.

02:32 - Dealing with Longer and Longer Test Suites

• High Cost Tests and High Value Tests

09:43 - What causes people to get into this trouble?

• On Writing Software Well #5: Testing without test damage or excessive isolation

12:46 - If you had a fast test suite, would you still parallelize it in the CI?

15:12 - What does it mean for your library to still be functional?

• dont-break

21:35 - Bugs found via the dont-break style of testing

• GRPC

24:06 - Inferring which tests are run from a production code diff

29:31 - Coverage, what's it good for?

• RSpec

33:53 - What kind of features would you expect out of a CI-aware testing suite?

Part I: Episode 004: In The Testing Weeds

Special Guests: Justin Searls and Penelope Phippen.