On my continuing quest to get better at testing, I have spent quite a lot of time in the last couple of weeks reading about testing, watching tutorial

The Flywheel of Testing

submited by

Style Pass

2021-06-04 19:30:03

On my continuing quest to get better at testing, I have spent quite a lot of time in the last couple of weeks reading about testing, watching tutorial videos, and practicing testing in my work. It has been a long, slow, difficult, slog. I'm not sure what made me think of it, but I was reminded of a flywheel.

If you're not familiar, a flywheel uses its inertia (the conservation of angular momentum) to store energy. There are flywheels in ICE cars, childrens toys, and thousands of industrial machines. They are all around us. The dimensions and mass of the flywheel determine the energy needed to get it spinning and up to a useful speed, but once it's there it helps even out any fluctuation in pace.

I believe that if not already fully, I am *this close* to a complete understanding of the fundamentals of testing. As concepts, I grok pure functions, side effects, isolation, dependency injection, and mocking.

What I don't fully grok yet is the tools I'm using to put this understanding to useful implementation. I am not exactly proud of the test code I've been writing this week. It's a mess.