Testing Heresies
by Francis Hwang
Sure, we're all supposed to be testing here in Ruby-land. But if you think about it too much, you
might come up with some inconvenient questions. Should you always write small incremental tests?
What if there are more important things than having a test suite that runs quickly? Doesn't testing
mean that your code can actually be messier? Does mocking suck? Francis Hwang will draw on personal
experience, tangential examples, spurious charts, and pseudoscientific equations in an effort to
address these and other questions in the thorny subject of testing.
About Francis Hwang
Francis Hwang is a writer, artist and software engineer. An active member of the Ruby community, he
founded Ruby-NYC in 2003, helps organize the annual Gotham Ruby Conference, and is currently a
software engineer at Diversion Media. His writing on technology and culture has appeared in Spin,
Wired, ArtByte, and FEED Magazine. His artwork has received press coverage in Wired News, Art in
America, and Liberátion (France). His talk at last year's RubyConf, titled "Conversations vs. Laws",
is perhaps most well-known for offering a 300-word legal definition of the word "buttocks".