Google Testing Toilet Collection

In my one of my previous posts i wrote about Good Unit Tests. During my research i discovered the famous Google Testing on the Toilet posts which provide great advice. The Testing-on-the-Toilet articles are short (~3min reads) and give hands-on examples, ready to be applied immediately. Here are my favorites:

Testing on the Toilet

• Tests Too DRY? Make Them DAMP!

• Exercise Service Call Contracts in Tests

• Only Verify Relevant Method Arguments

• Keep Tests Focused

• Cleanly Create Test Data

• Only Verify State-Changing Method Calls

• Keep Cause and Effect Clear

• What Makes a Good End-to-End Test?

• What Makes a Good Test?

• Know Your Test Doubles

• Just Say No to More End-to-End Tests

• Don’t overuse Mocks

• Change Detector Test Considered Harmful

• Test Public APIs over implementation details

• Test behaviors, not methods

Code Health

Code Health is a subseries of Googles Testing blog and contains fundamental wisdom about keeping large codebases maintainable, readable and “healthy”. Following these practices reduces complexity and facilitates simplicity. As a consequence programming stays enjoyable and developers productivity does not decay over time.

• Code Health: Respectful Reviews == Useful Reviews

• Code Health: Make Interfaces Hard to Misuse

• Code Health: Obsessed With Primitives?

• Code Health: IdentifierNamingPostForWorldWideWebBlog

• Code Health: Providing Context with Commit Messages and Bug Reports

• Code Health: Eliminate YAGNI Smells

• Code Health: To Comment or Not to Comment?

• Code Health: Too Many Comments on Your Code Reviews?

• Code Health: Reduce Nesting, Reduce Complexity

Hackable projects

Google defines “hackable” code as code which is “nice to work on”. In this subseries they define the traits of healthy and likable projects.

• Hackable Projects - Pillar 1: Code Health

• Hackable Projects - Pillar 2: Debuggability

• Hackable Projects - Pillar 3: Infrastructure

More on testing and code health

Are you interested in even more Google testing practices? I recommend the great talk “All Your Tests are Terrible…” from Titus Winters and Hyrum Wright, both are co-authors of the #FlamingoBook which gives deep insights in Google’s software engineering practices. Hyrum has even his own law named after him – Hyrum’s Law.