Go Slow to Go Fast

Aaron Greenwald

Software engineering is often a race against the clock. The competition doesn't rest, impatient clients have deadlines, and management wants results. You desperately need a way to improve your team's velocity. Can automated test coverage really be the answer? Perhaps, but only if you can overcome the organizational hurdles that stand in your way. Changing an existing team's culture is never easy, and it gets increasingly difficult as teams get larger and organizations more "enterprisey". Come hear Aaron Greenwald discuss how their group at Microsoft worked to change a fast-moving development team that doesn't have time to test into a faster-moving development team that doesn't have time not to. He'll also take a practical look at the kinds of tests we can write and best-practices for making sure they actually serve as the velocity drivers we need them to.

00 / Velocity

The Holy Grail

v = ds/dt

a = dv/dt

Labor Efficiency

Open Space

WFH

No Coffee

More Coffee

The Great Accelerator

Technology

Infra

Azure/AWS/GCP

Frontend Frameworks

Libraries

(goes both ways)

01 / Go Slow to Go Fast

By Serafina from San Francisco, USA - DSC00910, CC BY-SA 2.0, Link

Velocity isn't the goal...

It's the side-effect

Reusable Code

Documentation

Architecture

Abstractions

Planning

but also...

02 / Tests

Regressions Cost Time

Triaging

Debugging

Fixing

Deploying

Post-mortems

Managing Up

Safe Refactors

Faster Deployment

But...

Writing tests can be time-consuming

There's a learning curve

Tests cost more than code!

Tests are worth it

(I think)

How do we sell it?

03 / Selling It

Return on Investment

Showing Value

04 / Return on Investment

Biggest win for smallest effort

Testing Pyramid

Where to start?

The tippity top

testim.io

leave the middle for last

05 / Showing Value

Catching Bugs

Focus on:

Fragile

Frequently Changed

Foncusing

Carrots

(and sticks)

06 / Farm Animals

By byronv2 - Source, CC BY-SA 2.0

Clean Tests

Tests Are Code, Too!

Descriptive failures

Read like prose

given-when-then

Keep them SHORT!

Hide the mess

Thank You