It’s not about your Assertion Library

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I’ll be the first to admit: writing tests? Not all that much fun! And that’s coming from somebody who maintains a test runner in their spare time.


Once you have some tests though, you can have confidence. And once you have confidence, you can make changes. And changes are what’s needed to build awesome products.


So let’s not talk about API details, let’s talk about getting testing done. About being better engineers. About building awesome products.

This talk has been presented at TestJS Summit - January, 2021, check out the latest edition of this JavaScript Conference.

FAQ

Mark Rubin works as a principal product engineer at Monolith, a financial service provider in the cryptocurrency space in the UK and Europe.

Ava is a Node.js test runner maintained by Mark Rubin in his spare time, which is designed to facilitate testing in development projects.

Mark Rubin's talk focuses on the role that software testing can play in the profession, discussing its importance in ensuring product quality and reliability.

The Muslim storm surge barrier is a major engineering project in the Netherlands designed to protect Rotterdam and surrounding areas from storm surges. It features two massive gates that can be floated and lowered to prevent flooding, controlled entirely by software.

Mark Rubin believes that software development should focus on building products that serve customers effectively, emphasizing the importance of collaboration, iteration, reflection, and making trade-offs to deliver value.

Mark compares the difficulty of widening the base of dykes, which is necessary for heightening them, to dealing with legacy code in software development, highlighting the constraints imposed by existing structures.

Mark Rubin emphasizes testing because it provides confidence that the software will function as expected, even as changes are made, ensuring reliability and reducing the risk of defects.

Mark Rubin confesses that he does not particularly enjoy writing tests but acknowledges their importance in ensuring software reliability and building confidence in the products developed.

Mark Wubben
Mark Wubben
25 min
15 Jun, 2021

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Video Summary and Transcription

This Talk discusses the importance of software testing and engineering through the example of the Muslim storm surge barrier in the Netherlands. It emphasizes the need for iteration, reflection, and making trade-offs in building great products. Testing assumptions and writing good tests are crucial for delivering value and building confidence in code. The Talk also explores the balance between test coverage and confidence, and how to foster a developer culture that values testing and collaboration.

1. Introduction to Software Testing and Engineering

Short description:

I maintain a Node.js test runner called Ava. This is a talk about what I think we should strive for in our profession and the role that software testing can play. Let's look at an engineering project delivered in the Netherlands back in the 90s, costing nearly half a billion euros. The Muslim storm surge barrier protects Rotterdam and the surrounding area from storm surges. The Dutch determined that the dykes were not high enough, so a more creative solution was required. Elsewhere in the country, we have the off-slide dyke. Rotterdam Harbour was the world's largest seaport. The Dutch build one of the world's largest moveable structures.

Hi, thanks for joining me. My name is Mark Rubin, and in my spare time, I maintain a Node.js test runner called Ava. Maybe you've heard of it as foreshadowed by the title of this talk. I'm not really here to talk about Ava, but you should totally check it out.

Now, in my day job, I work as principal product engineer at Monolith, which is a financial service provider in the cryptocurrency space in the UK and Europe. I'm not really here to talk about that either, but of course you should totally check it out. This is not a talk about test runners, nor a talk about cryptocurrencies or how I write tests in the office. Instead, it's a talk about what I think we should strive for in our profession and the role that software testing can play. My job at Monolith and my hobby of maintaining a test runner give me what I hope is an interesting perspective on this.

So, to start us off, let's look at an engineering project delivered in the Netherlands back in the 90s, costing nearly half a billion euros. It was a success, 2 million people rely on it, and yet it's rarely been used. So, this is the Muslim storm surge barrier. It protects Rotterdam and the surrounding area from storm surges. So, if I zoom out a bit on the map, you start to see all the towns around it. I grew up somewhere north of that, but Rotterdam is down here.

Now, of course, the Dutch are somewhat famous for holding the sea at bay, and typically we build dykes, or levees as they're also known. It's a wall to keep the water out. And the land around this waterway is protected by dykes, but in the 80s, the Dutch determined that the dykes were not high enough. So, the obvious solution is you make them higher, right? But to do that, to increase the height of a dyke, you need to widen the base. And this is hard to do when you have centuries old towns built next to the dykes. Legacy code, if you will. So, relocating these towns would have cost a fortune and taken decades, and a more creative solution was required. Elsewhere in the country, we have this, which is the off-slide dyke. And it separates the North Sea from what is now a lake, but what used to be known as the Southern Sea. But because it separates, you know, a sea from a lake, it's pretty easy to widen this and to make it higher, which is a project that is underway right now. Oh, and there is one other problem, which is that, back in the 80s, Rotterdam Harbour was the world's largest seaport. I think it's still top 5 or definitely top 10. You can't quite close that off because, well, where are all the containers going to go. So, just like how with NPM, we built the world's largest package registry, the Dutch build one of the world's largest moveable structures. So there's two gates.

2. Storm Surge Barrier Design

Short description:

There are two gates that can be floated into the waterway and lowered, protecting the hinterland from storm surges. Each gate is 22 meters high, 210 meters wide, backed by 237 meter long trusses resting on the world's largest ball joint, by the diameter of ten meters, for a combined weight of nearly 15,000 tons. This is all controlled by a computer using 200,000 lines of C++ code, designed using formal methods.

Let's see if I can play this. Here we go. There's two gates that can be floated into the waterway and lowered, protecting the hinterland from storm surges. Each gate is 22 meters high, 210 meters wide, backed by 237 meter long trusses resting on the world's largest ball joint, by the diameter of ten meters, for a combined weight of nearly 15,000 tons. And this is all controlled by a computer because you can't have anxious operators close off a busy port because a storm is brewing. So the humans have been replaced by 200,000 lines of C++ code, and the test suite is 250,000 lines. But this is not your average piece of code. The system was designed using formal methods. You can find a 20-year-old paper on that and it's only going to cost you 40 euros.

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