Creating a Sustainable Software Cycle
Breaking the perpetual deadlock of legacy code, lack of testing, and missing documentation
Having been an iOS developer at quite a few tech companies, from small to large, I’ve found that they all mostly share the same painful reality of software development:
- Lots of fragile legacy code that is risky to refactor or update because it is untested
- Tests can’t be written for legacy code because what it even . . .
A Useful and Practical Approach to Testing
Having established what tests can actually be good for, outlined the only two types of test that matter and their value, and having attempted to make the case against a narrow fixation on “unit tests”, where does that leave us?
Well, it leaves us free to think about how we can write good tests that are useful and practical! And the . . .
The Two Kinds of Tests
One aspect of testing that gets fairly confusing is that there are many different kinds of tests discussed in various articles, and the exact difference between those tests is often a matter of debate. A partial list of some of the categories of tests you may have read about includes:
- Unit tests
- Integration tests
- . . .
Testing and the Product Cycle
In response to my last post, I had a few insightful readers ask about various types of testing and if they went beyond the single purpose of confirming expected behaviors.
I also mentioned in the last post that human QA analysts are often able to effect quality in a way that automated tests currently do not, but that such an . . .
What Is Testing For Anyway?
The first part of a fresh look at testing
For something that is thought to be precise and unambiguous, the whole subject of software testing tends to be comically unclear. I’ve had a deep interest in the subject of automated testing for iOS for years now, and find that if you ask 3 people what the point of testing is, you’ll probably get a dozen different answers.
For . . .
Exploring the New UI Testing Features of Xcode 7
Good first impressions, but some significant rough edges
So, I spent a bit of time on the weekend playing a little more in-depth with the new UI Testing APIs in the Xcode 7 beta 2. Please note that this is beta software, so many of my observations may not be true for the final release or future betas.
The Good
UI testing feels like an effortless and natural part of the . . .