Rolling for our new initiative: Test Composer

Having good tests can save time and energy in a variety of cases, not only in software development. A while ago, I got really into dice making, and started making sets for my friends. I got one request for special ‘liquid core’ dice. To make them, you inject a mix of liquids and sparkly mica powder into a tiny glass sphere, seal the sphere, then add it to a die mold with epoxy resin. The first time, I waited for a few days – in vain – for the dice to fully harden. I repeated the process again. And again. But still no luck. What was happening?

Maybe I wasn’t mixing a perfect 1:1 ratio of epoxy resin to hardener. Or perhaps the liquid from the orbs was leaking? Eventually, I tried making a set with a completely different resin, and lo and behold, the dice hardened perfectly. Had I tested the resin by itself, tried a different resin sooner, or better – regularly tested the resins so I’d know if they’d gone bad – I wouldn’t have been left with 3 sets of upsettingly squishy dice.

I found it hard to think of and implement every useful test case when making dice – just as it is when testing software. Antithesis tries to make this easier with powerful autonomous software testing. However, one area where we still need active work from users is on the test templates that exercise the software by generating sequences of unique tests, and validating that work on the Antithesis Platform. Writing good test templates is actually one of the most important (and currently most neglected) things users can do to ensure success (read: find interesting, hard to find bugs).

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