Jason Fleetwood-Boldt is an automated testing specialist who has spent 20 years helping startups and fledgling tech ventures launch tech products. With this long career to draw conclusions from, Jason believes the most important factor that will determine your success is automated testing and test-driven development. If you don’t have solid, strong automated testing, your project or venture will fail. If you do, you will have a good chance of success.
Here’s Jason’s list of 10 sane defaults that every project must have to succeed:
1. Keep your tests hermetic.
2. Always focus on the target of the test.
3. Tests should be expressive, targeted, and purposeful.
4. If a test is flakey, make it less flakey or remove it.
5. If a test is brittle, make it less brittle or remove it.
6. Use testing to expose poor domain design. See testing as a domain design exercise first, and a means to catch regressions secondarily.
7. Avoid snapshot testing and shallow testing (unless you have no other choice)
8. Always prefer factories over seeds or fixture data.
9. Continuous integration runs on every commit and on every PR.
10. Use testing and TDD to identify complected code and work to de-complect the codebase as you refactor.
Jason is an entrepreneurship-focused innovator and engineer. In being this, he is returning the craft of software to its core elements.
Jason’s radical (‘to the core’ or ‘to the source’) understanding of what software encompasses: being engaged, showing up, doing the work, keeping the ego in check, and staying committed to sane defaults.
Jason runs Helios Dev Shop in Brooklyn, NY. In addition to being a specialist in Automated Testing for your React, React-Ruby, NextJS, Shakapacker, or iOS app development. Jason coaches small businesses and entrepreneurs in SEO and social media marketing. Get in touch today at heliosdev.shop
Here, you can find Jason’s course material and writings about Rails, React, Javascript, Typescript, iOS development, TDD and automated testing.
In addition to being a SEMRush certified SEO specialist, Jason’s open-source Rails engines have been used by companies across the world.