Test, Create, Secure, Repeat

Michelangelo certain knows what he is talking about, but the session was plagued with problems in running the required configuration. Part of this was due to the target audience - developers relatively new to testing and specifically PHPUnit. The level of prior knowledge varied significantly throughout the room.

One thing that I think might have helped is clearer instructions on changing branches...maybe a command to run that would take care of clean up, branch checkout and composer steps in a single step. Or at least the commands listed on-screen.

Also, the platforms being run varied throughout the room. There were Macs, Windows PCs, and Linux PCs. But Michelangelo had that managed pretty well as he had USB sticks that had the full setup on them. That worked pretty well.

I run PHPUnit already and have done TDD in the past (and still do when possible), so much of the information was review for me. I still learned something though, so it was a good session.

I thought there were some interesting pieces of information in this talk but I think it wasn't as good as it could have been.

The git repo was an excellent idea but it could have been much better. Have clearer examples. What exactly are you expecting us to do? I didn't like the CronManager example because it wasn't clear what we were trying to implement. The slides talked about one test method and then it was "Go implement". Go implement what, exactly? Michelangelo, did his best to describe what the CronManager is, but it wasn't clear he wanted us to design new classes for the Events, Scheduler, etc., when the only example was a single test case. I initially thought the purpose was to write a new tests. It was only checking out the next branch did I understand what he was trying to get us to do. That too though was far too complex to complete for the time provided within the session.

The class is about testing, so it would have been better to have had classes that we need to write tests for so we can deep dive into writing better tests.

I did learn a few things from the class so least I got something out of the class.