What's that Smell? Tidying Up Our Test Code - Angie Jones

We are often reminded by those experienced in writing test automation that code is code. The sentiment being conveyed is that test code should be written with the same care and rigor that production code is written with.

However, many people who write test code may not have experience writing production code, so it’s not exactly clear what is meant by this sentiment. And even those who write production code find that there are unique design patterns and code smells that are specific to test code in which they are not aware.

Given a smelly test automation code base which is littered with several bad coding practices, we will walk through each of the smells and discuss why it is considered a violation and demonstrate a cleaner approach.