Podcast artwork
Ben Rady and Matt Godbolt
"Scrubbers" to deal with date&time, GUIDs (things that vary in time).

Episode Summary

Ben and Matt trick another live human being into joining them on the podcast. Clare Macrae joins to talk about her work with approval testing, her experiences dealing with legacy Fortran and C++ code, and an upcoming Webinar she's doing on refactoring-to-testability using CLion.
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  • The "chicken and egg" problem in testing legacy systems.
  • "Scrubbers" to deal with date&time, GUIDs (things that vary in time).
  • Using "Reporters" for approval testing visuals or audio.
  • What are approval tests?
  • How to start going about doing approval testing.
  • Where to learn more.
  • Great uses for the 'watch' tool and https://github.com/eradman/entr
  • Approve testing web pages and pdf files.
  • New vocabulary: "Reporters" for approval testing.
  • Overhead of approval testing: mostly file i/o.
  • Changing the behaviour should be kept separate from refactoring.
  • When to use approval testing? A: Legacy code / hard-to-test new code. 1) For a lump of code that can't divide up to write unit tests. 2) Convenient for small projects. 3) Fantastic for large number of input parameters.