The trouble with the term “end-to-end testing” is that nobody can agree where one end starts and the other end finishes. If you’re not running your tests on the end-user’s machine are you even trying?
:P
Chris Oldwood
@chrisoldwood@mastodon.social
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4.6.0-nightly.2026-04-17
toot = reinterpret_cast(life);
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@chrisoldwood@mastodon.social
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2d ago
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@chrisoldwood@mastodon.social
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2d ago
@thirstybear
I’ve never done any Java so the code is as irrelevant to me now as it was in 2010, I’m just going along with the narrative.
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@chrisoldwood@mastodon.social
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3d ago
@thirstybear @tdpauw @samir @mrksdck
I’m reading it again at the moment (I skim read it back in the 2010’s 🤭) and I’m getting the impression it puts more emphasis on the functional side.
Maybe I need to go back and start it for a third time because I’m not interpreting it correctly… 🤔 (It wouldn’t be the first time I got the wrong end of the stick 😁.)
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@chrisoldwood@mastodon.social
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3d ago
TIL: the Pester testing framework for PowerShell has been included out-of-the-box since Windows 10! I looked at this way back in the early 2010’s when it first appeared and then promptly forgot about it for 15 years 🙄. I’ve just seen it used for some console app E2E tests💡.
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@chrisoldwood@mastodon.social
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3d ago
@thirstybear @tdpauw @samir @mrksdck
Unless I misread the GOOS book, which focuses on how to create good internal structure by working outside-in, then we disagree by more than you think :o).
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@chrisoldwood@mastodon.social
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3d ago
@thirstybear @tdpauw @samir @mrksdck
In my talks about testing I talk of the Testing Polygon instead of Pyramid exactly because the landscape has changed so much in terms of performance that many tests that were once expensive are now cheap and reliable. Michale Feathers’ definition of slow and unreliable tests is totally out of date, and has been for over a decade.
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@chrisoldwood@mastodon.social
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3d ago
@thirstybear @tdpauw @samir @mrksdck
I think teams have heard “e2e tests are slow and bad” and avoid them up front, instead of facing into them and adapting *if* they turn out to become a drag on delivery. Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water.
(Of course the definition of e2e differs depending on who you’re taking to and what environment you’re in, which doesn’t help matters.)
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@chrisoldwood@mastodon.social
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3d ago
@thirstybear @tdpauw @samir @mrksdck
I’ve just finished a gig where there are only unit and component tests, nothing automated involving the outer layers of the onion. All the non-automated testing involves shared infra because nobody took the time to get that going, so there are huge gaps and it takes time to regression test. They were web APIs and there are Azure local emulators for all the internal dependencies.
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@chrisoldwood@mastodon.social
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3d ago
@thirstybear @tdpauw @samir @mrksdck
I disagree that e2e tests have to be slow. In the days of Oracle / SQL Server, yes, but eg Mongo’s in-memory mode (added >10y ago) means API acceptance tests took ms to run, and under a minute for the entire suite. You could do outside-in and add unit tests for the gaps. The is exactly how the GOOS book talks about working.
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@chrisoldwood@mastodon.social
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6d ago
I hear that Anthropic are worried about the potential damage caffeine fuelled hackers could do with their latest LLM, they feel Coke & Mythos could be an explosive combination…
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@chrisoldwood@mastodon.social
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Apr 11, 2026
Oh dear, what an utter disappointment Saturday Night Live UK was 😔. It was so bad we couldn’t face watching to the end of the first episode, and it’s incredibly rare that we bail on anything that quickly. We even managed two entire episodes of Space Force, and that was awful!
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@chrisoldwood@mastodon.social
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Apr 10, 2026
The correlation between a rich entrepreneur and a crap vibe-coded software product is known as affluent and effluent coupling…
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@chrisoldwood@mastodon.social
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Apr 09, 2026
The travelling salesman problem is typically described as NP hard, whereas avoiding a supply chain attack on your package manager is apparently NPM hard…
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@chrisoldwood@mastodon.social
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Mar 23, 2026
[2016] Mocking Framework Expectations
https://chrisoldwood.blogspot.com/2016/06/mocking-framework-expectations.html
More time wasted debugging an intermittently failing unit test caused by a mocking framework trying to be “helpful” instead of screaming that a dependency wasn’t explicitly configured 🤷♂️.
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