An effective test strategy to grow applications

This is a post to summarize my understanding (as of today) of an effective (low ceremony) way to build applications.
Let's take a look at (a slightly modified version) of Mike Cohn's layered test pyramid.



The choice of a pyramid indicates the robustness/stability of a lower layer directly affects the effectiveness of the upper layer. Also the number of tests decreases as you move up. As the agile testing book says ROI is maximum at the bottom (speed of feedback over time invested) and wanes towards the top.
e.g. without robust unit-tests, DSL tests or GUI tests would catch a bunch of errors without the essential feedback needed to fix it quickly. More and more errors would make it up to the middle and top layers, where it is more time-consuming/expensive to find-n-fix. Nothing replaces well-written, quick, professional unit tests.
To prevent ambiguity and misinterpretation, let's go over each layer.

Review : Growing Object Oriented Software - Guided by Tests: Freeman, Pryce

Recommended... best book on TDD in a while.

Just finished this one today... I got to fess up - that I am a "classicist". I've seen some real spaghetti tests involving mocks.. But I've gotten some periodic tension from the people on the other side of this religious fence of TDD. Since this book comes from "the torch-bearers of the mockist camp", I picked up a copy and tried to keep an open mind. And I although I haven't switched camps.. I now see the light. There is no one right path but the authors have placed some industrial strength beacons on this path and teach you how to use mocks and interaction tests to "grow" applications driven by automated tests. (However I still maintain that in untrained hands, Mocks (like C++) can be very dangerous and quickly lead into tarpits. Easy to abuse. However in the right hands, they can be used to write very expressive code & enable rapid and iterative development. ).

Some of the key takeaways for me were:

• Developing outside-in ATDD: writing a 'walking skeleton' first , spotting objects and roles (relationships) between them, TDDing these objects and "folding them back" into a running app was a new method to me.
• Listening to the tests, Focus on readability, tests with helpful diagnostics / failure messages, eliminating or reducing the irrelevant part of the test, use of builders + drivers to keep the tests concise
• The chapters on threads and asynchronous testing are home-runs. Don't leave for work without it. The last third of the book was worth the price of the book (It isn't yet available in India so had to get it from overseas).

There is a lot of real world knowledge that the authors have distilled down to a kind of 'secret sauce'.