Meet One Of Our Speakers: Steve Love

by Idalia Kulik, on 7 January 2024

Mini spoiler-alert as far as the contents of this talk go!

This talk is very code-focussed, and likely incomprehensible to non-programmers! — Steve Love

With that in mind, this is the overview of Steve’s upcoming presentation from our NorDevCon website.

Introduction to property-based testing in (mostly) C# Are you tired of trying to find every edge case in your code and write a test for it? Generative testing is the answer to that. In this talk we'll explore how property-based testing is the antidote to brittle and hard-to-maintain test suites. Using examples in C# (and some in F# for variety), we'll work through how to take your existing example-based tests and evolve them to use property-based testing to expand your coverage and probe your edge-cases more thoroughly. Unit testing code is often seen as a bit of a tedious necessity: tests can be brittle in the face of even innocuous change especially when there are several similar tests to probe edge-cases. Example-based testing, as its name suggests, usually takes a single example to examine a specific edge-case. Some example-based tests can use test parameters to generate several examples; by contrast, property-based testing generates random values for each test which can give extra insight into your code, and sometimes produce surprising failure-cases.

If you’re reading this and have made it this far into the blog, we can only assume you are a die-hard tech-geek and are willing to learn more. In which case, do stay tuned for our unique insight into the upcoming talk from Mr Love himself!

🧑‍💻 What inspired you to choose this particular topic for your talk?

Steve: We hear a lot about the importance of unit testing, but property-based testing doesn't get anywhere near the same levels of exposure. It complements (good) unit tests, and can even help with composing better tests.

🧑‍💻 Who would find your talk useful?

Steve: If testing is about confidence (spoiler alert: it is) then property-based tests can help boost our confidence that our code always does what we think.

This talk is very code-focussed, and likely incomprehensible to non-programmers!

🧑‍💻 If you could give us 1-3 main takeaways for your upcoming talk, what would they be?

Steve:

  • Finding good test data is difficult.
  • Property-based testing can help with that.
  • Example-based tests are still necessary.

🧑‍💻 Will there be any specific tools, technologies or frameworks that you will be talking about?

Steve: FsCheck & NUnit for .NET, code mostly C# some F#

🧑‍💻 What kind of audience engagement do you prefer, if any? Would you be engaging with the audience during your talk, or would you encourage people to ask you questions after your talk??

Steve: Either is fine.

🧑‍💻 Are there any “teasers” you could give us?

Steve: Have you ever found a nasty edge-case in code after you shipped it? Did you kick yourself for not spotting it before (and writing a test for it)? This talk may be right up your street.

🧑‍💻 Finally, are there any additional links you would like us to include in the posts, so that people could find out more about you or check out your work?

Steve:

Amongst these links, there is a book Steve recently wrote, for all of you C# lovers out there!

We, of course, encourage you to meet Steve up close and personal at the upcoming NorDevCon 2024, but if fate has it otherwise, you can also check out his work (see above) and get in touch with him via LinkedIn

If you haven't already, you can, of course, get the tickets to see Steve and other speakers at our Conference.

Thanks, Mez, Alex, Ida, & The nor(DEV):con Team