Unit Testing Deconstructed - Emily Taylor - NDC Sydney 2020

Unit testing principles are often touted as being core to good coding practices - but definitions like "Unit", "Unit Test" and "Public Interface" don't necessarily mean what developers expect them to mean or are taught. Since Kent Beck wrote "Test Driven Development" back in 2002 key misunderstandings have proliferated practices that result in brittle test suites, hard to read test cases, and friction when refactoring. In this talk, we'll look at where today's unit testing principles have come from and pull apart some conventional practices. We'll look at desirable test qualities and trade-offs like making tests behavioral, isolated, writable, and/or structure-insensitive. Attendees should leave with a better understanding of how to discern between good and bad unit testing advice and some new tools in their toolbelt to go forward with.