Thinking in tests

Of course we want our code to work. That’s a given. And of course we want our code to be easy to write, to be fast and elegant, to sing when we put hands to keyboard. And to be worthwhile: to make a difference, to simplify a life, or maybe just make a buck.

Tests make it all possible. They don’t make it happen, but they make it possible.

So you’ve been writing tests. You make code that works. Let’s talk about what’s next.

James Shore teaches, writes, and consults on Agile development processes with an emphasis on technical excellence. He test-drove his first web application in 2000 and hasn’t stopped since. He is a recipient of the Agile Alliance's Gordon Pask Award for Contributions to Agile Practice, co-author of The Art of Agile Development (O'Reilly), host of Let's Code: Test-Driven JavaScript, and co-creator of the Agile Fluency™ Model. InfoQ has named him one of the “most influential people in Agile.”

Test flakiness - methods for identifying and dealing with flaky tests

Test flakiness is a problem ALL engineering teams face and is the most common thing that prevents continuous delivery. This talk will help you learn how to identify flaky tests, deal with them, and achieve confident continuous delivery.

Jason Palmer is technical product manager for web infrastructure and test infrastructure teams at Spotify. He has been at Spotify for 7.5 years mostly as a web engineer. He is also part of the Jest core team and creator/maintainer of jest-junit.

Scaling R&D to thousands of people without dedicated QA

At Shopify, we believe that QA is part of a software developer’s job. As a result, we don’t have a QA team. In this talk, we will present how we organize, what processes we have put in place, and what tools we have built to scale an R&D organization to thousands of people without having a single dedicated tester.

Adam is a development manager at Shopify and is currently focused on the backend for their retail products. He has dabbled in frontend and backend over the course of his career. He believes that being an effective communicator is an engineer's most powerful and least recognized asset.

Tests > types

Types and tests can both be leveraged to improve code quality in JavaScript applications. Unfortunately, both approaches tend to increase initial development time - although they save time and money in the long run. This lightning talk explains why, given tight development deadlines, tests give a better return on investment than types. Please note, this talk is NOT intended to discredit types, TypeScript, or other similar technologies.

Colin Ihrig is a member of the Node.js Technical Steering Committee, a libuv collaborator, and a hapi.js core team member. Colin is the author of Pro Node.js for Developers, and co-author of Full Stack JavaScript Development with MEAN. Colin is currently a software engineer at Joyent, focusing on Node.js enterprise support.

Integration Testing with Cypress

Automated UI testing is an important part of ensuring quality, which establishes confidence and help you ship faster. Unfortunately, writing e2e tests with protractor is difficult, hard to scale and will quickly become a maintenance nightmare. You can reduce your reliance on e2e tests by adding integration tests to your strategy. In this talk we will take a look at how Cypress can help you implement a strong integration strategy that improves efficiency, quality and promotes collaboration across your team.

Nancy is a software developer working at Rangle.io. She is passionate about quality and spends her free time contributing to the open source community for testing tools.

Component-Driven Development & Visual Test Coverage

Component frameworks like React/Vue/Angular have transformed the way user interfaces are designed, developed, and tested. Component-driven development (CDD) is a simple way to build, document, and maintain complex user interfaces for interdisciplinary teams. When combined with visual regression tests, CDD gives you awesome test coverage with almost zero additional work. In this talk, Michael will present a new tool to quantify and understand test coverage from visual tests, and show how this “testing-centric” way of evaluating your application can lead to better CDD. He will also compare and contrast this “component-centric” approach with other testing approaches and explain its strengths and limitations.

Michael maintains Storybook, the leading UI component workshop used by Airbnb, Lyft, Uber, Microsoft, IBM, Github, Atlassian, and thousands of other teams. He also develops Chromatic, the world’s most stable, scalable, and performant cross-browser UI component testing service.

Old solutions to new testing problems

JavaScript test tooling has advanced a lot in the last few years, but tooling can’t solve everything—we still have decisions to make about how to optimally set up our tests. It would be great if we could learn from experienced testers who came before us, but it can be difficult to follow writing about testing in a programming language we aren’t familiar with.

Luckily, there’s one book in particular that has a lot of language-agnostic testing wisdom to share: xUnit Test Patterns. We’ll walk through some of the “test smells” it describes and see examples of how they commonly arise in JavaScript, then we’ll apply the principles from the book to solve these problems. You’ll walk away from this session with more tools in your tool belt to solve testing problems, and clearer language to talk about the tools you already have.

Josh Justice has worked as a developer for 14 years across backend, frontend, and mobile platforms. He writes about testing and test-driven development on https://learntdd.in and https://reactnativetesting.io, and speaks about them at meetups and conferences.

Robust tests for unconventional environments

Writing robust tests for Dapper, a smart contract Ethereum wallet built as a Chrome extension, was a difficult task because of its unusual architecture. Since their users trust them with their valuable tokens and assets, tests were necessary for their team to deliver high-quality code. However, they were almost discouraged from implementing those tests because of the unique blockers they faced while setting up their testing environment. In this talk, Carolina will highlight the nuanced patterns and approaches they took to facing those challenges, in the hopes of giving other teams the tools to overcome obstacles when adding tests.

Some of the topics that this talk will cover are:

• How to build integration tests for an application that communicates with other webpages using a background script
• How to test interactions with a decentralized network in which transactions can take a couple of minutes to process
• How to check security vulnerabilities when dealing with client-side generated keys"

Carolina is a Colombian Software and Electronics Engineer living in Vancouver. She enjoys both low and high-level programming languages, but her passion is Frontend Engineering. She works at Dapper Labs, where she helped build CryptoKitties, the most popular blockchain game in history.

She is currently enjoying new challenges developing Dapper, a smart contract Ethereum wallet built as a Chrome extension. On this project, She has seen first-hand how reliable tests give her team confidence to write high-quality code and deliver features faster.

99% is not enough - full test coverage and why it's awesome

This is a talk about the benefits of rocking 100% test coverage (all lines, branches, statements, and functions). Isaac will address the arguments against doing this, the limits of the benefits, why it's worth the costs, how to make it stick, how to get even further with a coverage map, and how it improves your approach to writing code. And hopefully he will upset a small enough portion of the audience that he can get out with his head still attached.

Isaac is an accomplished JavaScript noisemaker. You may know him from such projects as npm, Node.js, and lots of other junk. He's here at AssertJS in his capacity as the author and lead maintainer of node-tap, JavaScript's second best and third most popular open source test framework.

This clever workshop will convert your team into TDD enthusiasts

TDD enthusiasts want others to get the religion but many developers find TDD awkward. Ryan has a clever workshop technique to flip whole teams to *preferring* TDD. It's fun and it uses some pavlovian conditioning. In this talk he will break it down so attendees can run the workshop for their teams.

Ryan is a software development coach at Cucumber and TheStack.io. Ryan helps teams increase delivery pace and quality with test practices and DevOps.

Pros and cons of UI testing tools

Selenium, Puppeteer and Cypress can be used for front-end web application testing. They can automate the keystrokes and mouse events. This lightning talk provides a quick overview of the pros and cons of each tool.

Clare is a UI test developer for the test team at OTTO Motors, a division of Clearpath Robotics. She has done both front end and backend functional testing for web applications in the past few years.