Wonderful tech talk by Gerard Meszaros who is a consultant specialising in agile development processes. In this particular presentation Gerard describes a number of common problems encountered when writing and running automated unit and functional tests. He describes these problems as “test smells”, and talks about their root causes. He also suggests possible solutions which he expresses as design patterns for testing. While many of the practices he talks about are directly actionable by developers or testers, it’s important to realise that many also require action from a supportive manager and/or system architect in order to be really achievable.

We use many flavours of xUnit test frameworks in our development group at Talis, and we generally follow a Test First development approach, I found this talk beneficial because many of the issues that Gerard talks about are problems we have encountered and I don’t doubt every development group out there, including ours, can benefit from the insight’s he provides.

The material he uses in his talk and many of the examples are from his book xUnit Test Patterns: Refactoring Test Code, which I’m certainly going to order.