Turning test writing into a consistently brief and pleasant experience

• Turning test writing into a consistently brief and pleasant experience by Wilhelm Klopp https://pretalx.com/djangocon-europe-2023/talk/YJQ8HR/

Writing tests for our web apps can be painful, slow, and boring. In this talk we look at 10 tools and techniques to make writing django tests a consistently pleasant experience.

There's one thing I enjoy least about software development: Writing tests. I appreciate the tests I've written in the past, but I do not enjoy the process of creating new ones. How can we make test writing a pleasant, brief, and fun experience? This talk looks at over 10 tools and techniques to accomplish exactly that.

• Engage the audience with some live poll questions:

  • How much time do you spend writing tests?
  • How much do you enjoy writing tests?
  • Have you spent time improving your own testing experience?

• What existing software engineering research says about how much time we spend on tests

• How we think about writing tests for our web applications:

  • What value do we get from tests, why do we write them at all?
  • How many tests should we write? What do we not want to test? How important is coverage?
  • What tests should we write? Unit tests, integration tests, Not too many, mostly integration
  • When does test driven development help us? When does it not?

• Techniques for making test writing more brief and more pleasant:

  • Putting in some time to write testing abstractions to improve the testing experience of your colleagues and future you
  • Testing utilities for managing time: freezegun, time machine
  • Testing utilities for dealing with outbound http requests: httpretty, response, VCR
  • Testing utilities for managing with SQL queries
  • Property based testing and ghostwriting with hypothesis
  • Kolo to turn recorded requests into tests
  • Pytest and the best plugins for saving time
  • Browser based testing: Selenium, storybook, etc.
  • Generating tests with large language models – How useful is Chat GPT?
  • Further tools and techniques from user interviews with django developers (this research is ongoing)
    • I’m in the process of interviewing ~20 django developers about their experience with writing tests and the steps the’ve taken to improve their test setup. I plan to incorporate many of the learnings in this talk

• Summary, Recap, Conclusion Attendees will come away with practical tips for how to improve their own experience writing tests.