Testing Tips & Tricks

Hello. Welcome to Testing Tips & Tricks. My name is Brian Croom. My colleague, Stuart, and I are really excited to share some great testing techniques with you that we have been learning recently. As the conference was approaching, we thought it would be really cool to have an app that we could use to find cool things to see and do around the area of the convention center. We've been building this app, giving it views for finding various point of interest around San Jose and listing how far they are away from you. Now, of course, we wanted to make sure we had a really great test suite for this app that we could run to give us confidence that our code was working properly and would keep working as we continue development. Today, we want to share four simple techniques with you that we found really helpful while writing tests for our app. Some strategies for testing networking code in your app, some tips for tests dealing with foundation notification objects, ways to take advantage of protocols when making mock objects in your tests, and a few techniques for keeping your tests running really fast. Let's start talking about networking.

To allow for dynamic content updates, we've been building our app to load its data from a remote web server.

Here are some things that we found useful when writing tests for networking code. But first, quick, a recap from last year. At WWDC 2017's Engineering Testability session, we discussed the pyramid model as a guide to how to structure a test suite, balancing thoroughness, understandability, and execution speed.

In summary, an ideal test suite tends to be composed of a large percentage of focused unit tests, exercising individual classes and methods in your app.

These are characterized by being simple to read, producing clear failure messages when we detect a problem, and by running very quickly, often in the order of