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The Test automation Pyramid series Starts on episode 1 and runs to episode 8.
Episode:
The smallest floor of the pyramid is the top as it’s much narrower than the spacious bottom. While the top only has room for a ping pong table and a TV, the bottom has room for a soccer field or two. We fill this spacious floor with microtests: unit tests that check that every public function of every class is working as the developer designed it. Micro tests check fine grain behavior of that function, testing that the function performs correctly for different inputs. Inputs which are necessary for the product to operate correctly. Each public function in the entire Code base should have their own micro test just as the electronic manufacturing industry discovered more than 30 years ago, to only use chips and electrical components that are unit tested before assembling a product. Executing Microtests don’t require deployment of the app, external services, network connections, file systems, or database. The most effective way to develop microtests are having the developers build them while writing the code using a practice called Test Driven Development, a practice we’ll cover in a later podcast. Tools for building automated micro tests (also known as unit tests) are: JUnit, NUnit, GTest, Jasmine, Mocha Chai, UTPLSql, TST, TSqlT, and more. Next episode we’ll head to the penthouse of our pyramid and talk about macro tests.
