What Is in This Book?

Part I (Chapters 1–5) covers the principles and practices that guide successful testing. Chapter 1 puts the approaches in the book into an engineering context, discussing engineering, craftsmanship, and first-time quality in general as well as some software-specific concerns. Chapter 2 examines the role of intent. Chapter 3 outlines an approach to testing to help you focus your efforts. Chapter 4 discusses the interaction between design and testability, including some thoughts on scaling your testing efforts. Chapter 5 presents a number of testing principles that you can use to guide your testing decisions.

Part II (Chapters 6–13) details the implementation patterns for testing, starting with bootstrapping your tests and the basic catalog of techniques in Chapter 6. Chapters 7 through 12 elaborate on the topics introduced in Chapter 6, with an interlude to investigate intent more deeply in Chapter 9. Chapter 13 takes a deep technical dive into what many people consider impossible by introducing techniques for deterministically reproducing race conditions.

Part III (Chapters 14 and 15) takes the principles and techniques from the rest of the book and provides a narrative for applying them in two real-life, worked examples. Chapter 14 examines using test-driven development to create a Java application from scratch, showing how to get started and how to apply the techniques in a strictly typed language. Chapter 15 takes an untested, open-source JavaScript jQuery plugin and brings it under test, demonstrating an approach to taming legacy code in a dynamic language. Both examples contain references to the detailed GitHub commit history behind the narrative.