Re-factor

Head out to the Code Climate blog and read my guest post there called Kickstart your next project with a Walking Skeleton, where I explain the concept of a Walking Skeleton and how it can keep projects on track by surfacing many of the risks involved with the design and deployment of complex applications. Go ahead and read it and explore the many other great posts there.

Many thanks to Frazer Horn and Susan Potter for reviewing an early draft of the post.

Update: now using ruby 2.1’s keyword arguments syntax. Also added a refactoring step.

If you have a slow test suite and you are asking yourself “how can I make my tests faster?” then you are asking the wrong question. Most chances are that you have bigger problems than just slow tests. The test slowness is merely the symptom; what you should really address is the cause. Once the real cause is addressed you will find that it’s easy to write new fast tests and straightforward to refactor existing tests.