Obeying the Testing Goat: building a test obsessed culture at your company

@jduims OBEY THE TESTING GOAT Building a test obsessed culture
at your company

@jduims http://ivory.idyll.org/blog/whats-with-the-goat.html

@jduims IT ME • I’m early career • Mostly have
done backend web development • Also new at my job

@jduims WHAT’S THE ACTUAL PROBLEM?

@jduims PEOPLE PROBLEM & ENGINEERING PROBLEM

@jduims CULTURE • The social behaviour & accepted norms in
a society/group

@jduims CHANGING CULTURE IS HARD!

@jduims REQUIREMENTS.TXT • Repetition • Reinforcement

@jduims ENGINEERING PROBLEM • Regressions & breakages are a real
risk • Lack of testing infrastructure makes writing tests much more work • Testing is a skill that not everyone knows how to do

@jduims SAD REALITIES • You can’t & shouldn’t just give
up & write all of the tests by yourself • Tests are great but don’t add “visible business value” • Strong-arming coworkers has limited value • Tests are useless unless you run them [CI ]

@jduims WHAT’S A GOOD TEST/SUITE? • Tells you code meets
the requirements • “actually test things” • FREE DOCUMENTATION OF INTENDED USAGE • Have instructions on how to set them up

@jduims GOOD TESTS AND SUITES… • Have docs about how
to set up and run them • Limit mocks as much as possible • Organized so you can ﬁnd things • Use planned infrastructure and tools so things are tested consistently across the code base

@jduims “BUT NOBODY IS WILLING TO WRITE TESTS AT MY
COMPANY”

@jduims By Eric Hunt (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html), CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)
or CC BY 2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5)], via Wikimedia Commons

@jduims WHY PEOPLE DON’T WRITE TESTS • No consequences •
Nobody’s watching/no social pressure • They don’t ﬁnd it fun • Don’t necessarily have the skills

@jduims WHY PEOPLE DON’T WRITE TESTS • Current tests don’t
pass (so why bother?) • Lack of testing infrastructure support (no standard provided mocks, testing tools set up, no access to a DB during the

@jduims TESTING CAN HELP YOU IMPROVE… • Reliability/correctness • Certainty
about code interactions before deploying • Clarity: writing tests lets you be the ﬁrst user of your code • Prevent feature loss

@jduims SET SOME WELL DEFINED GOALS • Avoid infinite yak
shaving • My current scope: • Anti-regression: Write a test that verifies every bug fix • New code means writing new tests • Plan some projects to get some standard testing infrastructure developed

@jduims OTHER OPTIONS • Feature parity loss prevention: Add test
coverage to a legacy project so you can start to change it • Leveling up test skills

@jduims BUY IN

@jduims CO-CONSPIRATORS • Lend credibility you might not have •
Act as additional reinforcement for you when you’re not around

@jduims INFORMATION IS POWER • Review past outages- be able
to mention ones where testing would have helped • Are you planning any big upgrades? (eg: upgrading Django) • Heat map of what code coverage you have • Have some good examples of tests that you like

@jduims BOSS CHAT • Talk about what you want (based
on your speciﬁc scope) • Frame your goals in alignment with things your boss cares about

@jduims REACTIONS MAY VARY

@jduims WHAT YOU REALLY WANT • PERMISSION TO: • Give
a talk with your coworkers about new shared expectations • Add a testing chat to your on boarding • Performance management for devs who consistently don’t test • Approval to spend the time you need working on the projects from your goal

@jduims COWORKER CHAT • This shouldn’t actually be about “how
to write tests” • Just set expectations for what you want going forward • Also give heads up about what any upcoming projects coming out of that

@jduims OTHER BONUS STUFF TO MENTION • Writing tests helps
you clarify what decisions your team needs to make about implementation details • Free usage docs!!

@jduims NEW EXPECTATIONS • Mention your team’s speciﬁc goal •
Talk about code review expectations • Quality & sufﬁcient number of tests count in the review now! • Fix a bug or issue? Write tests to verify and prevent this issue from ever happening again

@jduims MAINTENANCE

@jduims THIS PROJECT IS PART ONE OF YOUR JOURNEY TO
A RELIABILITY FOCUSED CULTURE

@jduims KEEP DOING THE WORK • Continuing education-share examples of
good tests when you see them • Code review checklist • Regularly review metrics (code coverage heat map? Number of outages/ month) • If there are folks who aren’t on board, consequences & performance management must occur

@jduims PLANNING FUTURE CODE • Think about testing while you
decide on an architecture–Need to test with Celery if you’re using it- eager mode not a good test. • Docker-type stuff hugely helps (infrastructure in a box) • Think about skills your team has or doesn’t have before you commit to a distributed systems architecture (or other kind of new testing styles) • Give your team time to write supporting infrastructure as part of a new project

@jduims ONBOARDING MEETING • Part of maintenance because you want
to continue pushing your culture in the right direction • Help them set up their machines so they can run the test • Go through the code review checklist • Give them several “good test” examples from your code base • Consider pairing with them on a test

@jduims ACCEPTANCE • You don’t control every input to your
code • Scaling, load, concurrency are all not testable • PROD and DEV are never exactly the same • Never enough time

@jduims DON’T FORGET • Prevent regression! Write tests when you
ﬁx bugs! • Tests are free documentation

Obeying the Testing Goat: building a test obses...

Obeying the Testing Goat: building a test obsessed culture at your company

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