Hi list!<div><br></div><div>I while ago I asked here about why should someone bother with tests [0] and you all replied with </div><div>awesome answers that allowed me to pack a good set of slides for my presentation</div>
<div>later that week.</div><div><br></div><div>The talk was in Spanish and it was titled (translated): "Testing in Python: if it doesn't work, who do we blame?" [1]</div><div><br></div><div>So I wanted to give you an overview of what happened and how did the crowd reacted</div>
<div>to what testing is supposed to accomplish and why you should implement them.</div><div><br></div><div>I want to emphasize that this was a mixed crowd of non-testers and non-test-believers,</div><div>so I knew the task at hand (giving them good reasons on why to test) was going to be *very* difficult. I'm almost</div>
<div>certain that the actual percentage of test-believers was less than 1% (!).</div><div><br></div><div>It was extremely difficult to place myself in the crowd's shoes about not-testing. I wanted to give them a great</div>
<div>impression about the usefulness of testing and get them somewhat interested in the subject in a worse-case</div><div>scenario.</div><div><br></div><div>The presentation was as high-level and optimistic as I could make it. It covered things like automating "manual"</div>
<div>tests (e.g. checking terminal output) and having better client relationships because you can verify that most </div><div>of your code works as expected before shipping out products.</div><div><br></div><div>Most of the slides were visual with little content (I despise bullet points with lots of text) so I have not uploaded</div>
<div>them anywhere (they were also in Spanish). But they all were there to make a point, and double underline the idea</div><div>that you can't be a good programmer if you think tests are not the way to write code.</div>
<div><br></div><div>There was some family and friends in the crowd and after the presentation they told me they heard comments like:</div><div><br></div><div>* that makes sense</div><div>* yeah, can't be expecting the client to find errors</div>
<div>* debugging is easier?</div><div><br></div><div>Most importantly, I liked the "that makes sense" phrase. 80% of the presentation were punch-lines about testing</div><div>so that was one of the primary goals.</div>
<div><br></div><div>A big part of the crowd were college students and it was my impression that testing is not being taught at all as</div><div>part of the CS or CS-related courses.</div><div><br></div><div>I believe that testing is hard. Specially when you are just starting. There are a lot of open ended questions and if you</div>
<div>are just starting out with Python or programming in general UnitTest is a big hurdle (e.g. explaining class inheritance to</div><div>someone who has barely seen classes). </div><div><br></div><div>But programming is hard too. So it shouldn't matter that UnitTest *might* be difficult to grasp. If you want to get better</div>
<div>you might as well get used to learning things that are not easy to understand at first.</div><div><br></div><div>I finished my presentation asking the crowd to go back to their code and write a single test. Just one. And this one test</div>
<div>should replace whatever thing they were doing manually before. If they can write a single test and watch it pass they </div><div>can be motivated in writing another one.</div><div><br></div><div>Baby steps into testing!</div>
<div><br></div><div>Let me finish by saying (again) THANKS! for all the awesome answers. It definitely helped a lot in trying to show what</div><div>testing can do for you and your code and why it is utterly important to bother with it.</div>
<div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>[0] <a href="http://lists.idyll.org/pipermail/testing-in-python/2011-March/003959.html">http://lists.idyll.org/pipermail/testing-in-python/2011-March/003959.html</a></div>
<div>[1] The title was a trick question: you can't blame anyone if you do not know who broke the test(s) with the last commit :)</div>