In a lot of software development teams, test automation code is treated much less carefully than production code. It is expected to just work. Mindless copy and paste of setup code from one test case to another is seldom seen as problematic, scripts duplications are widely accepted, and things are named randomly.
This always leads to problems: gaps in assertions become pretty non-obvious; consolidating long-running test suites becomes a cumbersome task; magic numbers need to be changed all across the suite, when they become outdated. Problems like these (“tangles”) affect the overall maintainability of our overall test automation code base.
Over the years, the presenter has identified several good practices (“untangles”) to prevent these problems and keep test automation code maintainable. Some borrowed from general good code quality standards, some specific for test code. This presentation briefly discusses the properties of good test code. It presents a bunch of good practices and shows them applied to an example (in Java). In the end, you should be able to identify tangled test automation code and apply the techniques to untangle it.
Video producer: https://oredev.org/
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