Testing Complex Systems with Maintainable Test Suites – Podcast

Creating maintainable test suites for complex systems. The episode describes some complexities involved with hardware testing, then shares techniques for shifting complexity out of the test cases.

* quick overview of what test instruments are * discussion of API and communication with instruments * techniques for shifting complexity out of test cases

These techniques should apply to all test suites dealing with complex systems:

* Creating test cases that are easy to read and debug and tell a story about what is being tested. * Pushing setup complexity into fixtures. * Pushing lengthy repetitive API call sets into helper functions. * Using stable, documented, interfaces.