Stop Mocking, Start Testing

Project Hosting at Google Code is a large, mature, modern web service, developed over a multiyear period of high developer turnover and rapid server technology advancement. We attribute its having thrived to its adherence to a few fundamental software engineering practices, principally testing.

We’ll talk about what a robust testing discipline means. We’ll talk about what we thought it meant when the service was young and why we were wrong. We’ll talk about what it meant when the service was in mid-life and why we were wrong. We’ll talk about what a robust testing discipline means for Project Hosting today, why we are most certainly right, and why we might also be wrong too.

Within Project Hosting’s testing history we’ll talk about mock objects, fake objects, continuous integration, and test suites. Within Project Hosting’s maintenance history, we’ll talk about creating loose coupling between software components, dependency injection, and refactoring.