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Delete tests

(andre.arko.net)
125 points mooreds | 1 comments | 27 Aug 25 11:18 UTC | HN request time: 0.213s | source
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recursivedoubts ◴[30 Aug 25 02:27 UTC] No.45071410[source]▶
One of the most important things you can do is move your tests up the abstraction layers and away from unit tests. For lack of a better term, to move to integration tests. End-to-end tests are often too far from the system to easily understand what's wrong when they break, and can overwhelm a development org. Integration tests (or whatever you want to call them) are often the sweet spot: not tied to a particular implementation, able to survive fairly significant system changes, but also easy enough to debug when they break.

https://grugbrain.dev/#grug-on-testing

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1. 3036e4 ◴[30 Aug 25 05:32 UTC] No.45072117[source]▶
I remember reading blogs (and Testing on the Toilet) around 2010 about how Google divided tests into Small/Medium/Large, with specific definitions, rather than trying to use more vague and overloaded terminology that no one ever agreed on. Seems like they are no longer doing that? Too bad, since I think it was a clever trick to avoid having to get into pointless discussions about things like "what is a unit?". Having experienced more than one project where a unit test was uselessly defined to "have to only run a single method, everything else must be mocked" I like the idea of not having any level of tests below "small" (that is still above a level most would call "unit").

Found this long 2011 post now that goes into some detail on the background and the reasons for introducing that ("The Testing Grouplet"?): https://mike-bland.com/2011/11/01/small-medium-large.html

But I am not sure even after reading all that if the SML terminology was still used in 2011 or if they had moved on already? Can't really find any newer sources that mention it.