To the uninitiated, software testing may seem variously boring, daunting or bogged down in obscure terminology. However, it has the potential to be enormously useful for people developing software at any level of expertise, and can often be put into practice with relatively little effort.
Our 1-hour Call will include two speakers and at least 20 minutes for Q & A.
As someone with a background in science, not software engineering, Steffi LaZerte will share her experiences using automated testing in R to ensure that packages do what they’re supposed to do, on all the operating systems they’re supposed to do it on, and that they handle weird stuff gracefully.
Rich FitzJohn will talk about how to make testing much more useful than a chore that one does just because it is “best practice”, focussing on how testing has been useful in his work - refactoring code bases, preventing regressions, and improving how code is written in the first place. He will discuss how testing can help at the heart of processes, particularly in collaborative work, and how automating your testing leaves you with more time and energy to focus on your software, and describe strategies for testing as systems grow more complex, such as using mocking to simulate components.
