Tag: podcast

Marco Arment Does Not Unit Test

If you aren’t listening to the Accidental Tech Podcast, you should be. It’s by far my favorite podcast. On this week’s episode, episode 168, Marco Arment reaffirmed his stance that he does not unit test his code. The context of the conversation was that Marco was discussing how he had to put in an emergency fix for an upgrade to his sync algorithm for his iOS podcasting app, Overcast. The co-hosts on the show, John Siracusa, and Casey Liss immediately jumped all over him to point out that this was exactly the sort of problem that automated tests are intended to fix.

This isn’t new news that Marco doesn’t unit test his code, he’s talked about this in the past. I’ll be giving a talk at Philly CocoaHeads this week on automated testing, and one of the things that I’ve been wrestling with is: where do I begin the talk? How much background should I assume? Are we still at the point as a community where we need to debate whether automated testing is a good/worthwhile thing? If you’ve read other posts on this blog, my stance should be obvious- half the posts I’ve written so far have been in favor of automated testing! It’s been a while since I’ve worked in other platforms than iOS, but I hear communities like Ruby on Rails and .Net have incredibly deep adoption of automated testing and test driven development principles. And on iOS, there really are plenty of both open source options, and even Apple-endorsed options for adding automated tests to your code.

So why are we still debating whether automated testing is even a thing? To me, it’s not about critiquing Marco about his development practices. It’s about recognizing that 1 out 3 senior engineers on a popular podcast don’t write automated tests. Is that representative of our community?

For my talk this week, I want to address this, and I’m thinking this is where I’ll open it up for conversation at the end of the talk. The majority of the 30 minutes will be focused on some how-to techniques for adding automated tests into your apps.

I like this trend that I’ve started now of capturing “testing in the wild” – how last week I dropped the reference to Sam Soffes’ perspective on automated testing. In a lot of ways, these popular people in our industry have a lot of power. I can imagine if I were an aspiring iOS engineer hearing that Marco doesn’t unit test his software – it would certainly make me think twice about whether it’s a worthwhile endeavor.

Sam Soffes on Test Driven Development

It always feels good when your own perspective is validated by someone you respect. Listening to the Immutable podcast episode 36 today, Sam Soffes gave a great endorsement of test driven development that I agree with. Essentially the question was asking for Sam’s perspective on unit testing, specifically challenging whether they are worth the time or not. To summarize Sam’s response, he acknowledged that they might feel like a chore when you are first writing them, but it’s when you are going back to change the code later that the value really shines. This to me is one of the main reasons why I write unit tests. There have been many times when I’ve gone into an existing code base to make a change – either a bug fix or a feature enhancement, only to introduce another bug. It’s when you have an automated test catch this mistake that you’ll buy into the value as well.

Immutable Podcast

I also wanted to recognize this podcast as one that I’ve been enjoying lately. I think you’d like it too. Each episode focuses on five listener submitted questions to Sam Soffes, an iOS engineer, and Bryn Jackson, a designer. Bryan and Sam answer each question with a brief conversation, and the whole episode is 30 minutes or less.

Who is Sam Soffes

Sam Soffes first came onto my radar a couple years ago when I heard that he built and sold a todo app called Cheddar. Later on, I found some good use of his open source framework called SSKeychain. SSKeychain simplifies the storage and retrieval of data in the iOS keychain. It’s very popular on GitHub with over 3000 stars at the time of this writing.

A Role Model For Me

Sam is someone I recognize as a really good engineer in the industry, someone I aspire to be like. I feels really good when you have a role model reinforce one of your values. Take a listen to Sam Soffes on test driven development on Immutable, and let me know what you think.

Happy cleaning.