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Code as Craft

Teaching Testing: Our Testing 101 Materials main image

Teaching Testing: Our Testing 101 Materials

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Etsy engineers have a wide variety of backgrounds, strengths, and weaknesses, so there are no engineering skills we can take for granted. And there are things you can't just assume engineers will learn for themselves because you throw a codebase and a workflow at them.

I work on Etsy's continuous deployment team, which advises on automated testing of our code, and I felt that we could use some stronger means of teaching (and establishing as a conscious value) the skills of testing and design in code. To that end, I recently wrote two "Testing 101" materials for use by all Etsy engineers. They're now both on our public Github: the Etsy Testing Best Practices Guide, and our Testing 101 Code Lab for hands-on practice applying its ideas. Both use PHP and PHPUnit.

We called it the "Testing Best Practices Guide" because we love misnomers. It's more about design than testing, it describes few concrete practices, and we don't call any of them "best".

Within Etsy, we supplement mere documents with activities like team rotations ("bootcamps") for new hires, technical talks, and dojos (collaborative coding exercises) to practice and have fun with coding topics as a group. And of course, we do code review.

Deeper technical considerations are often invisible in code, so you have to find a way, whether by process, tooling, or teaching, to make them visible.