Get in Control of Legacy Code with Approval Testing

Approval testing is a technique that helps you to get a difficult codebase under test and begin to control your technical debt. Approval testing works best on larger pieces of code where you want to test for multiple things and interpreting failures is challenging.

In this hands-on session we’ll introduce a commonly-used Approval testing tool and learn to get control of some example code. The principles of Approval test design are in focus. Example code will be in Java, but detailed language-specific coding expertise will not be needed.

After the training, participants should be able to:

*Describe the characteristics of Approval Testing and how it differs from ordinary assertion-based testing

*Recognize Common test design patterns for Approval Testing

*Use the Approvals.Java framework to write test cases for existing code

*Inspect differences when a test fails and approve a new result

Participants should bring a laptop and expect to work on some coding exercises during the workshop, to illustrate the purpose and practice of Approval Testing.

If possible, install a Java IDE on it and clone the following github projects:

– https://github.com/emilybache/SupermarketReceipt-Refactoring-Kata

– https://github.com/emilybache/Product-Export-Refactoring-Kata.git

Both these repos contain the same exercise in multiple programming languages. Please open the ‘Java’ folder in your IDE and check you can compile successfully. We will work in small groups so if you can’t install these yourself you should be able to pair up with someone who can.