For the first few years of my speaking career, I viewed CodeMash as something of a White Whale; after all, the conference regularly brings in some of the best speakers in the industry, convening on the Kalahari at the beginning of the year like some sort of geeky New Years’ party. In 2017, I was lucky enough to give my first talk at the conference. Attendance was, well… let’s say “underwhelming”, but the experience of speaking at CodeMash was great.
This year, I’m proud to announce that I’ll be kicking of 2019 by speaking at CodeMash again! I’ll be giving my Testing Like You’ve Never Tested Before (Because You Haven’t) talk, which serves as an introduction to automated testing:
Testing software in an automated fashion is one of the best ways to guarantee quality, reduce bugs, and prevent regressions in our code, and is a prerequisite to operating in a Continuous Integration environment. Unfortunately, the most difficult parts of testing come right at the beginning: scaffolding a test suite and writing our very first tests. For those who are new to automated testing, these hurdles can prove overwhelming.
This talk covers the fundamentals of testing, in a beginner-friendly way. We’ll discuss how testing makes software better, the various levels of the Automation Pyramid, how to scaffold some basic unit and integration tests, and discuss the characteristics of great tests.
If you’ve been itching to learn how to test but haven’t quite gotten into it, this is the talk for you. The talk itself spends a fair amount of time on PHPUnit specifically, but the principles can be applied regardless of the language/framework you’re working in.
Event details
CodeMash 2019
Kalahari Resort & Convention Center
7000 Kalahari Drive
Sandusky, OH 44870 January 11, 2019
