Trisha GeeSep 25, 2023
Folks who have a LOT of automated tests for your app(s). Do you actively do anything to reduce the number of tests you have? Do you identify duplication / different tests that test the same functionality? If so, do you use this information to refactor/reduce your tests?
Show threadwouterlaSep 25, 2023

@trisha_gee pushing tests down to as low a level as possible and making sure they only test one thing should help avoid duplication.

Those validations should be unit tested, and a journey test should not check a validation, for instance.
Innervation tests should test integration, not business logic, etc.

It pays to be specific about the type of tests you use, and what they are for.

Show threadGeorge DinwiddieSep 25, 2023

@wouterla @trisha_gee
Yes, good organization of tests certainly reduces overlap, but I've never worried about overlap. It seems to me that aiming for the minimum number of tests is a concern for efficiency, not effectiveness.

What is the driving force to reduce the number of tests?

Show threadTrisha GeeSep 25, 2023
@gdinwiddie @wouterla I'm starting to see some organisations with so many tests, that take so long to run, that they're not running any of them. Reducing time to execute would encourage people to run these tests
Show threadGeorge DinwiddieSep 25, 2023

@trisha_gee @wouterla
In my experience, "time to run tests" and "number of tests" are not closely correlated.

What makes their tests slow?
- Dependency on external systems, e.g. database?
- Intentional delays waiting for system state to stabilize?
- Stochastic tests to look for infrequent events?
- or something else?

Show threadTrisha GeeSep 25, 2023
@gdinwiddie @wouterla yes this is all true. However I've been chatting with teams with 10s of thousands of tests, and they want to reduce their test times and don't know where to start. They hypothesise that there much be duplication but aren't sure how to find it
Show threadÖzkan The JVMBender

@trisha_gee @gdinwiddie @wouterla #intellij has test cover run, probably with that I would go over one buy one, and in maximum 1 week I would clear 10k tests, the number looks big but when you jump in it's very simple task to find intersection and cleanup 🤓

another approach would be write #gradle or #mvn plugin to give a report of intersecting tests, implementing this probably will take a week or 3 and cleaning up would take another week, min 4 weeks, maximum 2 months this task would be done.

Sep 27, 2023 at 5:53amWeb