Building Operable Software with TDD (but not the way you think) - Martin Thwaites - NDC London 2023

Discover a new approach to Test-Driven Development (TDD) that prioritizes operability, observability, and context to ensure your software thoroughly meets business requirements and behaves as expected.

Key takeaways

Building operable software means making sure it runs in production environments and meets business requirements.
TDD should be used to test the entire application, not just individual classes.
Observability is crucial for understanding the internal state of a system, and should be built into applications.
Context is important for understanding what code does, and should be provided in test names.
Tests should be written from the outside in, starting with the consumer’s perspective.
The goal of testing is to make sure the application behaves as expected, not to prove that it works.
Don’t test individual methods or classes in isolation; test the entire application as a whole.
Use business language in tests to make them more readable and understandable.
Don’t reuse code or classes in main assemblies; instead, create separate test assemblies.
Use in-memory exporters to speed up testing and make it more efficient.
TDD is not just about writing tests; it’s about writing tests that are readable, understandable, and provide context.
Tests should be written to provide a safety net for the application, not just to prove that it works.
Don’t use asserts to test individual conditions; instead, test the entire application as a whole.
Observability is not just about metrics or traces; it’s about understanding the internal state of a system.
Context is important for understanding what code does, and should be provided in test names.
Tests should be written to provide a safety net for the application, not just to prove that it works.

Building Operable Software with TDD (but not the way you think) - Martin Thwaites - NDC London 2023

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