Testing Testing 1, 2, 3! JuniorDev Refactor hosted a testing workshop! #Melbourne
In November last year, JuniorDev ran it’s second technical workshop and it was all about testing! The first workshop was on Build & Deploy pipelines and it was a huge hit. Our community shouted out for one on testing soon after and because we’re suckers for peer pressure, we engaged Matt Hilton again, an incredible software consultant, to help build the curriculum and lead the day for this Testing workshop!
Testing… what testing though? It’s a big topic! Luke, Matt and I thought long and hard about what to include. We did research with our Junior Developer peers about what frameworks they used here locally in Melbourne, what was common, what’s new, best practices, and what would be practical!
We looked to the testing pyramid, and picked out some key areas to focus on, and decided to start at a common entry point for developers when it comes to testing, Unit Tests. We believe in solid foundations, so for some it was revisiting what they knew and consolidating, and for others, it was brand new. We love the way Matt also includes the “why”, he provides that context about why something is important, why it’s done, and why it’s not done too. This context helps people to make decisions for themselves, armed with understanding, not just syntax!
What is turning into a Refactor tradition, we did Terminology Talk exercise where we have the devs get up and write down what their understanding of some Testing jargon meant, in small groups on the walls (on paper!). It’s always a great way to get people moving and talking and working together first thing!
What we did
- Wrote unit tests from scratch
- Used mocks to make tests faster and more reliable
- Debugged failing tests
- Wrote integration tests
- Managed test data to ensure consistent reliable test results
- Wrote automated UI tests
- Debugged more failing tests
- Wrote tests for front-end and back-end code (Javascript & NodeJS)
We of course had a delicious lunch of baguettes and superfood salads where we hung out in the very cool Xero breakout area, just like I do every day at work!
We had an example application that we had built to use as the base for our testing examples. We do away with foo and bar in Refactor Workshops, and although our Pet MatchMaker wasn’t a production ready legacy app with thousands of lines of code, it was a hit with the devs, and kept things simple enough to concentrate on what mattered, testing!
The last exercise of the day was less technical, more tactical! We did “Pyramid Testing Ping Pong”© !
We arranged the cups into two pyramids on each side of the net, the first team to clear all the cups in their pyramid (ie, full coverage) from the table, won! Was a lot of fun and pretty hectic towards the end!
We’ve always worked hard on making our events inclusive to all, and we were again pleased to see the workshop result in over 50% female attendance. It’s so great that developers feel safe to learn, ask questions, and even fail (in that good way) at the workshops. We couldn’t be more proud of them!
We had software developers from
, Envato, Australia Post, Hooroo, Deloitte Digital, some amazing self studying coders and some cool Comp Sci students too, all who were 100% awesome!We’d like to send a huge shout out to Matt Hilton for yet another amazing day as our instructor, and all of the attendees who spent their time and money to deep dive into testing with us!
Till the next time..
Cheers!
LJ & Luke
We’re working on some more cool things this year too! Levels is the first conference in Australia crafted for building technical careers, from the very beginning.
Levels brings together our future leaders, that’s you, Junior Developers, in a fun and engaging environment where they can network with their peers and industry participants. We celebrate the Juniors Developers of software today! We value their place in the community and support, encourage and grow with them. Grab a ticket!
