JCON EUROPE 2023

Have you ever encountered a hard to maintain or brittle test code base ?
Do your tests give you the confidence to refactor freely and safely ?
Or maybe you have opened a project and noticed different testing styles or approaches and got confused ?
Should I write an integration test, unit tests, acceptance tests or a mixture ?
How do you manage test fixtures ?
Or maybe you saw the time it took to run your tests, grow exponentially ?
I believe that architecture should be done on all levels and the test level is often neglected .
I would like to approach the design of our test suites in the same manner as we design the architecture of our applications, with great care of the important parts.
Tests make up an integral part of our code bases. Among other things, they can protect us from regression and serve as documentation.
But often they become a hodgepodge of different ideas and approaches, undermining the purpose and reason for their existence.
A test suite that is difficult to work with may affect the product and team's velocity in a negative way.
When putting down an application's architecture we often do not put enough emphasis on the testing part.
Therefor I believe it's time to put some architectural ideas behind our tests.