Introduction to Approval Testing

(This is a hands-on lab with limited capacity)

Approval testing is a technique that helps you to get a difficult codebase under test and begin to control your technical debt. Approval testing works best on larger pieces of code where you want to test for multiple things and interpreting failures is challenging. In this hands-on session we'll introduce a commonly-used Approval testing tool for Java and through hands-on exercises learn to get control of some example code. The same tool is also available for many other programming languages, and the principles of test design are what we will focus on. See https://approvaltests.com/.

Session outline:

Introducing Approval Testing (55 minutes)

• Code Review: examine existing test case, discuss strengths & weaknesses
• Demonstration: Convert an assertion-based test to use Approval testing
• Hands-on exercise: Add some tests using Approvals.Java.

Break (5 minutes)

Approval Test Design (50 minutes)

• Presentation: Approval testing characteristics and design patterns
• Exercise: Using the default XML printer with Approvals.Java
• Demonstration: Using scrubbing with an XML printer
• Presentation: when to print, when to scrub

Q&A (10 minutes)

Bring your laptop with a modern browser like chrome. Bring a separate keyboard and mouse if possible to enable pairing.

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