Herding Cats: Managing Large Test Suites
This report will focus on challenges we faced maintaining hundreds of builds that encompass tens of thousands of assertions. Over the past five years our development team, at Iowa Student Loan (ISL), leveraged TDD and Continuous Integration to develop software. Tests and builds quickly accumulate and maintaining them can be like herding cats. We were often tempted to neglect these tests in the pursuit of developing new functionality. We would like to share strategies that helped us maintain our automated test investments.
2 minutes: Introduction
10 minutes: Explore three factors that contribute to unmanageable builds within ISL. - 1. Overly coupled tests - 2. External dependencies - 3. Turned off tests
15 minutes: Describe how we decouple tests and minimized the impact of new requirements
10 minutes: Demonstrate how we utilized mock services to speed up build times and reduce volatility
5 minutes: Describe our approach for tracking and reviewing tests that are not running
3 minutes: Q&A
- Prepare tests for new requirements
- Design tests that provide reliable results
- Reduce the time of feedback loops
- Track tests that are temporarily turned off

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