May 28, 2023
In last week’s blog we talked about the first rule of Test Easy: modularity. No more cut & paste. If shift left testing is going to be a thing, it’s got to be easy, and modularity of test design goes a long way to ensuring this easy — for devs of all skill levels, across the CI CD pipeline for who care about testing microservices and APIs in the context of cloud native software development.
Modularity makes the second rule of Test Easy easier to achieve: readability. Software readability is, of course, related to the comprehension of text, and it’s essential for software maintenance. Testing frameworks are no exception to this rule.
When it comes to Test Easy, readability has many contributing factors. Above all it’s about doing things in a way developers and others invested in shift left microservices testing find familiar. Some might call this “meeting X where they are” but we won’t engage in derivative language groupthink in this blog. Test Easy has to provide comfort at every skill level. Comfort at every stage of the CI CD pipeline. Comfort, by using the most popular languages for building. Comfort, by dispensing with the need for a whole new DSL.
Readability requires a glanceable testing framework where it’s easy to understand both the building block modules and the entire test design. A framework that supports both integration and load tests as table stakes for cloud native app testing. That makes it easy to pull from a comprehensible library and use the same readable test design, or reconfigure it to better meet your testing needs.
Test Easy is modular, and it’s readable. And these two essential tenets converge to deliver the third essential element. Which we’ll cover in next week’s blog!