Wicked Fast Testing: Part 1

“1 hour each day was spent rewriting the code. 7 hours was spent rewriting the tests.”

I’m really excited about this new series on Wicked Fast Testing. When I started CodeFaster, Wicked Fast Testing was one of the big ideas I wanted to share. It has saved me countless tedious hours of manually refactoring tests and changed the way I think about testing. Let’s jump into it.

Problem: Testing is slow

Wicked Fast Testing started because in 2017, I was shipping a new system. It was changing constantly. There were ever changing requirements. We discovered bugs in our vendor. We discovered bugs in the library that wrapped their API. We discovered undocumented features from our vendor. We discovered bugs in our code. And, often times, we just needed to refactor our codebase.

1 hour each day was spent fixing the code. 7 hours was spent fixing the tests. True, I had 200+ tests, but this system moved other people’s money. We couldn’t imagine accidentally taking someone’s money, so why should our sys…