Podcast artwork
Two's Complement
Special Guest: Clare Macrae
Ben Rady and Matt Godbolt
Ben Rady and Matt Godbolt
New vocabulary: "Reporters" for approval testing.

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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Clips

  • 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.
  • New vocabulary: "Reporters" for approval testing.
  • Changing the behaviour should be kept separate from refactoring.
  • Approve testing web pages and pdf files.
  • Overhead of approval testing: mostly file i/o.
  • Great uses for the 'watch' tool and https://github.com/eradman/entr
  • Where to learn more.
  • How to start going about doing approval testing.
  • What are approval tests?
  • Using "Reporters" for approval testing visuals or audio.
  • "Scrubbers" to deal with date&time, GUIDs (things that vary in time).
  • The "chicken and egg" problem in testing legacy systems.