You’ve just switched teams or companies, and you are being introduced to the test automation framework, and all its glorious underlying code. A scenario we’ve been in numerous times, and a scenario most of us will continue to experience. That code is now your code, there are new tests that need creating, test failures that need fixing and you are expected to hit the ground running.
We simply can’t just open an IDE and start writing code, we need to see what we are working with, we need to see what patterns are being used, and more important, which ones aren’t. This is an essential step in being successful on a new team, because without investigating the current code we simply can’t make good judgements on how to approach new work.
This doesn’t have to be a long process though. In this workshop we are going to explore a code base, quickly evaluate the patterns being used and make judgements on their use and practicality using our framework scorecard, that we’ll introduce in the workshop. In doing so, it’s also likely we won’t see some patterns we are perhaps used to seeing. That leads us to the final part of this short workshop, where we’ll plan suggestions on how to improve the code, and provide clear explanations as to why these suggestions are worth exploring.