82: Scott Nimrod: Software Craftsmanship – Revenge of the SDET

Software Craftsmanship – Revenge of the SDET

In this episode, we’ll talk with Scott Nimrod about Software Craftsmanship and how to take your development and testing efforts to a new level. Discover some modern testing techniques that can really improve the quality of your unit testing and automation testing efforts.

Scott’s enthusiasm and hustle around self improvement and making development efforts awesome really shine through in this can’t-miss episode for folks that are serious about testing and development.

About Scott

Scott Nimrod is fascinated with software craftsmanship. He has been practicing software development since 2003. He’s a thriving entrepreneur, software consultant, and he blogs. He focuses on native application development and Test Automation. He was born and raised on the mean streets of Cleveland, Ohio and currently resides in Miami Beach, Florida. His blog can be found at Bizmonger.Wordpress.com.

Quotes & Insights from this Test Talk

• I have reason to believe that within the agile movement- which you know, agile comes in a spray can, we spray it on ourselves and we say that because we do daily stand up, we're agile- but I have reason to believe that within the agile movement, it's popular belief that the development team is responsible for the quality of the code. That's the belief system that I've come across. I think that system is flawed when it comes to DMDs, dark matter developers.
• One book is xUnit Test Patterns. That changed the way that I write code. It's xUnit Test Patterns. It's a healthy book. It's probably about 500 pages. It talks about code smells, and it's pretty much design patterns in regards to the ecosystem of test automation of unit testing specifically. That book is a bible. 
• In SDET or another developer that's a craftsman that is really sick and tired of this culture of application developers not really being concerned with quality, they believe that quality is the job of QA, then as payback, as revenge- and I wrote a blog called Revenge of the SDET– is they can leverage these test mutation frameworks, and they can run it on the developer's unit tests and flag all the unit tests that pass regardless of the operators that are being used within their tests.
• The beautiful thing about property based testing is you're letting the framework manage the edge cases for you. That's the beautiful thing is you can tell- I think it complements your unit tests in which you leverage your property based tests to catch the edge cases or the special cases. That's something that application developers can also adopt or take in to their arsenal of tools.
• I look at functional programming as the next generation of programming languages that is going to still take a while for mainstream to adopt, but I look at it as a beautiful thing. 
• Software development is a practice. It's not a job, it's a practice. Refine it, refine it, practice makes perfect, and increase your worth, increase your worth so that you're making $50,000, $100,000 more than the rest of your competition. I feel like that's having your cake and eating it too. You build more on how to deliver more effective code, and you're making more money as a result of it. That's the best of both worlds.

Resources

• Hear more from Scott DotNetRocks, DeveloperOnFire
• Test Mutation Frameworks
• property based testing
• xUnit Test Patterns <– Book Recommendation

Connect with Scott

• Twitter: @Bizmonger
• Blog: bizmonger.wordpress.com

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