Are Your Tests Slowing You Down? • Trisha Gee • GOTO 2025
This title could be clearer and more informative.Try out Clickbait Shieldfor free (5 uses left this month).
A conference talk by Trisha Gee (Gradle) covering three main areas where testing slows developers down: writing tests, troubleshooting failures, and running tests. On writing tests, she argues the bottleneck is thinking about behavior, not typing — AI tools can help with test data and edge cases but are unreliable for full test generation. On troubleshooting, she recommends expressive test names, given/when/then structure, assertAll, and build observability tools to diagnose failures. On flaky tests, she advocates quarantining them with time-boxed annotations and dedicating time to fix them. For speeding up test runs, she covers build caching (20min→3min example with Spring Boot), parallel test execution, test distribution, and predictive test selection (ML-based, runs ~1/3 of tests). She closes by emphasizing that tests are living documentation of system behavior, and investing time in writing better tests pays off in reduced troubleshooting and flakiness.