Unit Testing Workshop Lessons Learned

At the end of January, we ran a Unit Testing Workshop. It went well. We had 7 participants. They included a LabVIEW Champion, and several CLAs. Overall the reviews were positive, but it was clear that there were some things that could be improved for the next time.

1. The Workshop needs to be 2 days instead of one. Since it was our first time running it, we were unsure how much could be fit in and how long it would take to cover everything. The consensus was that the class was like drinking from a fire hose. Everyone seemed to agree that the breadth and depth of the material were good and that it was very comprehensive in that it hit all the major points. It was just too much to cover in 1 day. Also, 2 days will allow more time for exercises and questions.
2. It needs more hands-on exercises. Because we were trying to cover so much and knew everyone in the workshop and knew they were all very high-level, we thought we could get away with fewer exercises. It quickly became clear to everyone that the workshop needed some more examples and more time spent hands-on actually writing some tests. We did some hands-on exercises but nowhere near enough.
3. The exercises need to be set up in such a way that the focus is on the testing part. Some of the examples used in the exercises came from real-life code, but the real-life code made things a little too complicated and distracted from the testing. We need to simplify some of the exercises and examples.
4. There were also a few minor things that came up, like some minor inconsistencies in the examples.

As a result of all this feedback, we are in the process of revamping the workshop and making it even better. It’s going to be 2 days and we are creating some new exercises and examples. We also reordered a few topics to make things flow better.

Testimonials

Overall most of the feedback on the workshop was positive. Here are a two examples:

Sam has deep knowledge on the subject of unit testing and how it can be applied to existing and future projects. His ideas are easy to implement and will improve anybodies workflow and project quality. Highly recommended for all architects and developers.

Ryan Good
CLD
Advanced Mabile Propulsion Test

Sam is really focused on improving processes in software development. He provides excellent classes and mentoring on steps that can be taken for us to become better and more efficient at what we do. He also shows you how to make teams more efficient. His training in Test Driven Development can dramatically increase the efficiency of teams as the time spent debugging and correcting issues created in the initial coding can be caught quicker with less work and fixed. This can have the result of reducing your project effort by 40% or better.

Bill Welch
CLA, CTD, CPI
Scenic Systems LLC

Upcoming Classes

We will be offering the new updated Unit Testing Workshop in April and again at GDevCon N.A. Check out the class schedule for more details and to sign up.