SFPHP Meetup at Bigcommerce

Last week Bigcommerce hosted the SF PHP User Group in our San Francisco office, where around 40 hungry developers gathered to hear me talk about Unit Testing Done Right.

This talk covered some of the historical context around unit testing, and how we got from the historical roots of unit testing to where we are today. I content that what Kent Beck was talking about in his Test-Driven Development By Example book was really more akin to SpecBDD, but that term didn’t exist at the time.

We also covered some of the main causes of flaky tests, and strategies to deal with each:

• Randomness
• Dependencies on system environment
• Dependencies on network/services

Furthermore, we talked about test coverage metrics, and how line coverage (the most common kind) is not as thorough or useful as we had been led to believe.

Finally, we covered some characteristics of good unit tests, along with some testing smells and what they mean.

We love hosting meetup groups at the Bigcommerce offices— if you know of any awesome software or technology meetups in SF, Syndey, or Austin, please get in touch with us!