„Pressure makes diamonds.” How I hate that saying! Pressure generates heat and heat leads to decomposition, both during cooking and in SW development…
Anne has been involved in software quality for over 25 years and has worked in many different projects, industries and roles. She is a well-known speaker at numerous conferences. She is also an enthusiastic trainer and book author. Since 2024, she has been fully responsible for Smartesting’s training course “Faster Testing with GenAI”.
„Pressure makes diamonds.” How I hate that saying! Pressure generates heat and heat leads to decomposition, both during cooking and in SW development. Projects under pressure accumulate technical dept. First, the documentation is neglected, and the urgently needed refactoring is postponed for another few months. Then we begin to fight against the consequences. Finally, we pay the interest by spending a considerable amount of time maintaining the source code and tests. Yes, there are also testing debts. The analogy can even be taken quite far, but we are more interested in the solution than the problem. After all, if a problem has similar causes and effects, you would think that it would also have similar solutions. But that is not always true. Just one example: Object-Orientated Programming (OOP) was a big step away from spaghetti code. According to the single responsibility principle, each object-oriented class has only one reason to exist. The same concept applies to unit tests, which derive their legitimacy directly from the unit they are testing. If you take this idea further, there must be exactly one test case per requirement or acceptance criterion. Unfortunately, this is exactly what happens and GenAI will not help us. Quite the opposite… Please do not misunderstand me. Of course, automated unit tests and user story acceptance tests are a good thing. But focusing entirely on them generates testing debt elsewhere. And there are other anti-patterns we observe today: focusing too much on coverage, repeating the same tests over and over again, or neglecting the user needs and the specifics of the production environment. In her talk, Anne will share her personal list of anti-patterns, discuss their origins and effects, and talk about how we can possibly do better.
