The Hazards of Transactional Test Isolation

These days, it’s standard practice to run your unit and system tests with some degree of parallelism. When doing so, it’s important to ensure that the code being tested doesn’t interfere with other running tests. Usually, this comes down to the database layer. There are a few options for accomplishing isolation at the database layer. […]

Helper Functions for Testing a PostgreSQL Database

When writing tests for a Node.js server, it’s common to test the database as well. (At least, one hopes.) Here are a few helper functions for testing a PostgreSQL database using Knex.

How to Ensure a Successful Mobile App Release

Releasing a new version of a mobile app can be a stressful process. The first few times you do it, your customer base is probably pretty small, so it doesn’t feel like a very big deal. However, after your user base grows into the thousands, the pressure really starts to build. The fear of releasing […]

HTML Snapshot Testing with Node

It’s been almost a year since my posts on Excel workbook snapshot testing and PDF snapshot testing. Both of these have proven to be very valuable in our automated test suite and have allowed us to easily catch regressions, manually inspect the differences, and then update as needed. Another task on my current project has […]

Replacing Heroku Review Apps on Non-GitHub Projects

If your software team develops multiple new features simultaneously, you need to be able to deploy and test them in isolation. The gold standard for this is to use Heroku’s review apps, which are temporary environments automatically spun up for each pull request. Unfortunately, the feature only works with GitHub; if you’re using another source […]

An Approach to Database Testing in .NET Core 2.1

I’ve been working on a REST API written in ASP.NET Core 2.1. Recently, our team wanted to write tests that exercised our business logic and also interacted with our database. I wasn’t able to find many examples of this online, so I was motivated to write this post and share our approach.

Testing in Elixir with Multiple Environments

About a year ago, I was learning how to properly unit test Phoenix applications using the Mox library. The strategy I adopted for my side projects involves adding “module dependencies” to any module I want to unit test, and then using Mox to configure those dependencies during the tests. While that approach is great for […]

Simulate Network Outages in Your App with Little Snitch

Modern development tools are super-convenient. XCode’s more recent builds let you debug an iOS app over WiFi, so you don’t have to succumb to the indignity of plugging in a Lightning cable (so 2017). React Native’s tooling goes a step farther, giving you the ability to run the native part of the app on a […]

A Simple Approach to Comparing Database Structures

On my current project, we are developing a replacement for a legacy system written in Visual FoxPro that our customer has used for the last couple of decades. Since there is a lot of risk in switching over, we have developed a bi-directional syncing tool that attempts to keep each system up-to-date with changes made […]

Headless Chrome with Testem on VSTS-Hosted Agents

I previously wrote about building a Node app on VSTS Windows agents. Since then, we’ve started using headless Chrome on those agents. Here’s how.

Atomic Spin

Atomic Object’s blog on everything we find fascinating.

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