I'm sorry, but this is nonsense. I'm in my mid-50s, and I'm still working as a highly-placed IC programmer working for cool startups. I've done management, and I'm not bad at it, but it's not to my taste. You can stay active as a programmer indefinitely, if and only if…

Back to Part 7. If you’ve gotten all the way to the end of this series: thank you! This has been a bit of a labor of love, distilling the lessons from many years of building Scala test harnesses whilst building Scala services. By way of summary, let’s tot up…

Back to Part 6. In the previous post, I made a number of suggestions about how to build your system in order to make it reliably testable. There’s a bit of controversy nestled in there, so let’s tackle it head-on. It’s not unusual for folks to take the viewpoint that…

Back to Part 5. Having discussed what sorts of tests to write for Scala services, and how extensively to test, let’s change gears and talk about a more basic principle: reliability. How many times has this happened to you? You commit your code, open a PR, your integration pipeline runs…

Back to Part 4. So far, I’ve argued that Scala services should favor scenario tests instead of old-fashioned unit tests in most cases. Let’s move on to the next topic: how much do you need to test? If at all possible, your Scala code should have automated test coverage, using…

Taking a brief break from A Philosophy of Testing for a little bit of good old-fashioned Dotty news: This morning, I noticed this Draft PR, titled “Generalize main annotations”. That’s pretty exciting. One of the nice features of Scala 3 is the new @mainannotation, which allows you to more-easily create…

Back to Part 3. Having argued passionately, in the last article, against writing too many unit tests, that begs the question: what should you be doing instead? In this part, I’m going to lay out the Scenario Test approach. Stepping back a bit, it’s common for folks to focus on…

Back to Part 2 In the previous article, I argued that Scala is a different language, and its testing requirements are different. Let’s examine a key difference: why old-fashioned unit-testing is mostly not a good idea for Scala services. (Please remember that this series is focused on testing services specifically…

Back to Part 1 This series of articles is specifically about testing applications written in Scala. Even more specifically, we’re going to be talking about idiomatic Scala. Now yes — there is no hard-and-fast definition of “idiomatic” Scala, and folks may disagree with the details here. But I think there’s…