Session 2.1
To [Unit] Test, or Not to Test?
Synopsis:
If you develop AEC applications, you really should be testing your code. In this class, we’ll give an overview of the different types of testing, why it’s important and can speed up your development process, and demonstrate how our company does our testing (and how we avoid over-testing too!).
Learning Objectives:
1. Learn what unit, integration, smoke, and other types of testing are.
2. Understand the benefits of testing your code.
3. Learn multiple basic and advanced strategies for writing your own tests.
4. See an example of how you can build your own testing framework to cover difficult code.
Body:
If you are a software developer in the AEC industry and have perhaps heard of testing but haven’t done enough of it (or any) yourself, this class is for you.
To start we will go over what testing is, and explain the differences between different types of testing, including smoke testing, unit testing, integration testing, and more.
Next, we’ll go over all of the benefits of properly testing your code. Just like you wouldn’t drive your car across the country without stopping for gas to “save time”, we’ll discuss how investing in unit tests and developing internal testing requirements can save you time when debugging and adding features, as well as catch the bugs before your customers do.
As for the testing itself, we’ll give an overview of various available testing frameworks, and show you some best practices on how to (and not to) write your tests.
We know that some AEC-specific software and UI/UX interfaces are difficult to test, so to close out the session we’ll demonstrate how we had to build our own testing framework to cover certain API’s, and show you how you can too!