Book Image

Agile Technical Practices Distilled

By : Pedro M. Santos, Marco Consolaro, Alessandro Di Gioia
Book Image

Agile Technical Practices Distilled

By: Pedro M. Santos, Marco Consolaro, Alessandro Di Gioia

Overview of this book

The number of popular technical practices has grown exponentially in the last few years. Learning the common fundamental software development practices can help you become a better programmer. This book uses the term Agile as a wide umbrella and covers Agile principles and practices, as well as most methodologies associated with it. You’ll begin by discovering how driver-navigator, chess clock, and other techniques used in the pair programming approach introduce discipline while writing code. You’ll then learn to safely change the design of your code using refactoring. While learning these techniques, you’ll also explore various best practices to write efficient tests. The concluding chapters of the book delve deep into the SOLID principles - the five design principles that you can use to make your software more understandable, flexible and maintainable. By the end of the book, you will have discovered new ideas for improving your software design skills, the relationship within your team, and the way your business works.
Table of Contents (31 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1
7
Section 2
13
Section 3
19
Section 4
25
Chapter 21
28
License: CyberDojo

Test Boundaries

The introduction of acceptance tests forces a discussion on test boundaries. What are the boundaries of an acceptance test? What about the boundaries of unit tests, integration tests, and end-to-end tests? In the following diagram, we try to convey our views on different tests boundaries.

Figure 16.2: Test boundaries

The problem is that test terminology is not very standardized, and in our experience, we have seen some confusion about the different concepts of tests. Hopefully, the following definitions clarify the terminology:

  • End to end tests: Focused on business requirements. Exercise the complete flow, including external systems. Usually, these tests are slow to execute.
  • Acceptance tests: Focused on business requirements. Exercise all parts of the flow in our system. Compromise on feedback and speed of execution. Faster than end to end tests, but not as thorough.
  • Integration tests: Focused on technical implementation. Exercise...