This month at Extreme Programming San Diego (XPSD), Dan and Llewellyn will
teach us how to write Approval Tests. The meeting will take place at
Cardinal Health at 6pm on Thursday, November 6th.

** Approval Based Tests **

Write your code, run it, see that it works. This is a familiar process to
all programmers. The addition of 1 line of code can now make that a
repeatable automated regression test!

Well tested code has been shown, over and over, to improve the quality and
maintainability of software. Yet most projects are not well tested. Why is
this? Too often programmers feel that testing imposes too high of an
overhead on writing code.

In this talk, our goal is to make it easier and faster for you to write unit
tests.

We will show how using approval tests, in addition to asserts, will great
increase not only the ease and speed of writing a test, but the completeness
and maintainability of those tests; bridging the gap between people who
don't write tests, and test driven developers.

"I feel like I have to write my code twice." Right now, unit tests impose a
difficult step upfront of knowing exactly what you want. Asserting this
outcome then becomes cumbersome the more robust & detailed it is. After
that, maintaining the test becomes equally cumbersome. Because of this,
tests either get written, or get discarded, leaving untested code which is
fragile, error prone and leads to the nightmare of maintenance so many
experience.

After this talk, you should find yourself spending less time writing tests,
yet having better tested code, a proven way to increase successfulness of
your software.

"After I heard Dan & Llewellyn talk about approval tests, I tried it out. in
the first 4 minutes I was testing my code" - C. Monkey

"I find myself writing more code just so I can write more approval tests!" -
Script Kiddie

"All my life I'd sought approval from other developers, now I can approve on
my own" - Noself E. Steam

"With all the time I saved, I actually learned to talk to women" - Anonymous


The meeting will be held at Cardinal Health San Diego Headquarters (
http://xpsd.org/CardinalHealthDirections ) from 6-7:30 PM on Thursday
November 6th.


http://xpsd.org
http://llewellynfalco.blogspot.com/2008/10/approval-tests.html