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The Bike Shed

448: Other Uses for Tests

33 min episode · 2 min read
·
Stephanie Minh,Joel Kenville

Episode

33 min

Read time

2 min

Topics

Design & UX, Software Development, Product & Tech Trends

AI-Generated Summary

Key Takeaways

  • Tests as learning tools: Writing tests for unfamiliar legacy code forces intimate understanding of edge cases and system behavior, making developers experts in complex areas teammates avoid. Backfilling test coverage reveals coupling issues faster than reading code alone.
  • Dependency graph decomposition: Break large features into leaf-node tasks with no blockers, ship each independently to production, then work backward to root. This approach transformed one risky multi-week initiative into 19 shippable PRs that maintained team velocity throughout.
  • Test-first code review: Reading test files before application code in pull requests provides context about intended behavior and edge cases, primes reviewers for what's coming, and increases confidence that last-minute changes didn't introduce breaking bugs before deployment.
  • Tests enable experimentation: A passing test suite acts as a safety net for trying multiple implementation approaches. Developers can discard entire code solutions while keeping tests, then attempt different designs knowing the specification remains constant and verifiable throughout iteration.

What It Covers

Stephanie and Joel explore how test suites serve purposes beyond verification: as learning tools for unfamiliar code, living documentation, code review aids, design feedback mechanisms, and accountability measures for shipping reliable features.

Key Questions Answered

  • Tests as learning tools: Writing tests for unfamiliar legacy code forces intimate understanding of edge cases and system behavior, making developers experts in complex areas teammates avoid. Backfilling test coverage reveals coupling issues faster than reading code alone.
  • Dependency graph decomposition: Break large features into leaf-node tasks with no blockers, ship each independently to production, then work backward to root. This approach transformed one risky multi-week initiative into 19 shippable PRs that maintained team velocity throughout.
  • Test-first code review: Reading test files before application code in pull requests provides context about intended behavior and edge cases, primes reviewers for what's coming, and increases confidence that last-minute changes didn't introduce breaking bugs before deployment.
  • Tests enable experimentation: A passing test suite acts as a safety net for trying multiple implementation approaches. Developers can discard entire code solutions while keeping tests, then attempt different designs knowing the specification remains constant and verifiable throughout iteration.

Notable Moment

Stephanie became the team expert on the most feared part of the codebase by methodically rewriting existing tests herself to understand complex, poorly documented code, transforming anxiety about an unfamiliar system into deep ownership and confidence.

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Episode Transcript

This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're building a b two b ass app, at some point, your customers will start asking for enterprise features like single sign on, skim, provisioning, role based access control, and audit trails. That's where WorkOS comes in. With ease to use and flexible APIs that help you ship enterprise features on day one without slowing down your core product development. Today, some of the hottest startups in the world are already powered by WorkOS, including ones you probably know, like Perplexity, Vercel, Jasper, and Webflow. WorkOS also provides a generous free tier of up to 1,000,000 monthly active users for its user management solution, making it the perfect authentication and authorization solution for growing companies. It comes standard with rich features like social logins, bot protection, MFA, roles, and permissions, and more. If you're currently looking to build SSO for your first enterprise customer, you should consider using Work OS. Integrate in minutes and start shipping enterprise plans today. Check it all out at workos.com. That's workos.com. Hello, and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at Thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Stephanie Minh. And I'm Joel Kenville. And together, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way. So, Joel, what's new in your world? What's new in my world is kind of an old thing that has resurfaced. Longtime listeners of the show will know that I'm a big fan of two things, chunking up work into smaller pieces and dependency graphs. And recently I got a chance to sort of blend those two together. Give a presentation on how leaning on dependency graphs can help you to chunk up your work and work in a more iterative fashion. Cool. How did you get to do that? So the team I'm on at thought bot every other week, somebody will do some kind of presentation and I volunteered for this quarter and chose to talk about that Inspired by some recent client work where there's a really gnarly problem that I was able to break down into a bunch of smaller pieces in a way that was really successful. If I had not chunked it up, I think that initiative would have been at risk just because it was kind of a interrelated ball of features that just kept growing. And if I hadn't been very disciplined about doing things in small pieces, it's the kind of thing that could have gone on for multiple weeks and just never gotten done. I recall you mentioning that a body of work that you did ended up being broken out into 19 PRs or something like that. Is that the problem that we're talking about? Yes. I may have even mentioned it on, on the podcast at one point when I was going through that work. But now I got to build on it and actually share. So I …

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