Test & Code

Lean TDD is an attempt to reconcile some conflicting aspects of Test Driven Development and Lean Software Development.

I've mentioned Lean TDD on the podcast a few times and even tried to do a quick outline at the end of episode 162.

This episode is a more complete outline, or at least a first draft.

If you feel you've got a good understanding of TDD, and it's working awesome for you, that's great. Keep doing what you're doing. There are no problems.

For me, the normal way TDD is taught just doesn't work. So I'm trying to come up with a spin on some old ideas to make it work for me. I'm hoping it works for you as well.

I'm calling the new thing Lean TDD. It's inspired by decades of experience writing software and influence from dozens of sources, including Pragmatic Programmer, Lean Software Development, Test-Driven Development by Example, and many blog posts and wiki articles.

The main highlights, however, come from the collision of ideas between Lean and TDD and how I've tried to resolve the seemingly opposing processes.

Links:

• Lean TDD | pythontest.com
• episode 162: Flavors of TDD
• What is Test Driven Development (TDD)? | Agile Alliance
• Test First Programming / Test First Development | pythontest.com
• episode 7: The Waterfall Model and “Managing the Development of Large Software Systems”
• episode 51: Feature Testing
• The testing renaissance — Twitter Engineering blog post about Feature Testing
• Lean software development - Wikipedia

Sponsored by:

• The Complete pytest course is now a bundle, with each part available separately.
  • pytest Primary Power teaches the super powers of pytest that you need to learn to use pytest effectively.
  • Using pytest with Projects has lots of "when you need it" sections like debugging failed tests, mocking, testing strategy, and CI
  • Then pytest Booster Rockets can help with advanced parametrization and building plugins.
• Whether you need to get started with pytest today, or want to power up your pytest skills, PythonTest has a course for you.

Paul Ganssle, is a software developer at Google, core Python dev, and open source maintainer for many projects, has some thoughts about pytest's xfail.
He was an early skeptic of using xfail, and is now an proponent of the feature.
In this episode, we talk about some open source workflows that are possible because of xfail.

Special Guest: Paul Ganssle.

Links:

• How and why I use pytest's xfail — Paul's blog post mentioned in the episode
• Craft Minimal Bug Reports — Matthew Rocklin's article
• episode 111: Subtests in Python with unittest and pytest - Paul Ganssle
• episode 165: pytest xfail policy and workflow
• episode 166: unittest expectedFailure and xfail

Sponsored by:

• The Complete pytest course is now a bundle, with each part available separately.
  • pytest Primary Power teaches the super powers of pytest that you need to learn to use pytest effectively.
  • Using pytest with Projects has lots of "when you need it" sections like debugging failed tests, mocking, testing strategy, and CI
  • Then pytest Booster Rockets can help with advanced parametrization and building plugins.
• Whether you need to get started with pytest today, or want to power up your pytest skills, PythonTest has a course for you.

Twisted has been supporting asynchronous / event driven applications way before asyncio. Twisted, and Glyph, have also been encouraging automated tests for a very long time.

Twisted uses a technique that should be usable by other applications, even those using asyncio or other event driven architectures.

Links:

• Community Service Award Recipient Glyph Lefkowitz — The PSF article I was referring to early in the episode
• Twisted
• twisted/klein
• twisted/treq
• django/daphne — Django Channels HTTP/WebSocket server
• Scrapy
• So Easy You Can Even Do It in JavaScript: Event-Driven Architecture for Regular Programmers - YouTube
• Feature test - twitter engineering
• Python Testing with pytest — Some reading for Glyph if he wants to learn to love pytest
• pytest-twisted
• pygame
• Pyodide
• Brython

Sponsored by:

• The Complete pytest course is now a bundle, with each part available separately.
  • pytest Primary Power teaches the super powers of pytest that you need to learn to use pytest effectively.
  • Using pytest with Projects has lots of "when you need it" sections like debugging failed tests, mocking, testing strategy, and CI
  • Then pytest Booster Rockets can help with advanced parametrization and building plugins.
• Whether you need to get started with pytest today, or want to power up your pytest skills, PythonTest has a course for you.

Having a personal site is a great playground for learning tons of skills. Brian Wisti discusses the benefits of running a his own blog over the years.

Links:

• Random Geekery
• Jamstack
• Eleventy
• Netlify
• Plausible Analytics
• pytest
• Beautiful Soup
• pyinvoke - Invoke!
• rsync
• Internet Archive : archive.org
• Rich
• Statamic
• jamstack.org
• A static site generator should be your next language learning project

Sponsored by:

• The Complete pytest course is now a bundle, with each part available separately.
  • pytest Primary Power teaches the super powers of pytest that you need to learn to use pytest effectively.
  • Using pytest with Projects has lots of "when you need it" sections like debugging failed tests, mocking, testing strategy, and CI
  • Then pytest Booster Rockets can help with advanced parametrization and building plugins.
• Whether you need to get started with pytest today, or want to power up your pytest skills, PythonTest has a course for you.

Don't you just love technical interviews, with someone who just saw your resume or CV 5 minutes ago asking you to write some code on a whiteboard. Probably code that has nothing to do with anything you've done before or anything you will do at the company.

No? Neither does Nathan Aschbacher.
So when he started building the team at his company, he decided to do things differently.

Hiring is one of the essential processes for building a great team.
However, it's a high noise, low signal process.

Nathan Aschbacher has a relatively unorthodox tech hiring approach.
He's trying to make it very humane, with a better signal to noise ratio.

Nathan is not intereseted in bizarre interview processes where the interviewer doesn't know anything about the interviewee beforehand, all people are asked the same questions, and people are asked to code on white boards.

Instead, he states "if the goal is to try to figure out if the person can do the work with your team, and your trying to build the team that you are adding this person to, they need to know what the team is like, and determine if they want to be part of the team, and the team needs to know what the person is like and if they would be addititve to the team.

So what's Nathan's process:

• Screening resumes and CVs, looking for internal motivation to become an expert at something.
• Basic phone screen, very informal.
• A couple 2-3 hour pairings with someone on the team with whatever they are working on.
• Debriefing both the candidate and the team afterwords.
• Giving the candidate an opportunity for a second impression and following up on difficulties during the pairings.

We discuss the process, and also:

• trying to remove the barriers to team integration
• treating people as humans

And of course, there's the story of how Nathan ended up interviewing someone with Zoo experience an no technical experience for a technical role. Of course, it was a misunderstanding of a job requirement around experience with ZooKeeper. But it's a good story.

Sponsored by:

• The Complete pytest course is now a bundle, with each part available separately.
  • pytest Primary Power teaches the super powers of pytest that you need to learn to use pytest effectively.
  • Using pytest with Projects has lots of "when you need it" sections like debugging failed tests, mocking, testing strategy, and CI
  • Then pytest Booster Rockets can help with advanced parametrization and building plugins.
• Whether you need to get started with pytest today, or want to power up your pytest skills, PythonTest has a course for you.