Jason Fleetwood-Boldt is an automated testing specialist who has spent 20 years helping startups and fledgling tech ventures launch countless products and apps. With this long career to draw conclusions from, Jason believes the most important factor that will determine your success is automated testing and test-driven development.
That’s why he created Helios Dev Shop, the automated testing dev shop in Brooklyn, NY.
If you don’t have solid and strong automated testing practices, your project or venture will fail. If you do, you will have a good chance of success.
Here’s Jason’s list of 10 sane defaults that every project must have to succeed:
1. Keep your tests hermetic.
2. Always focus on the target of the test.
3. Tests should be expressive, targeted, and purposeful.
4. If a test is flakey, make it less flakey or remove it.
5. If a test is brittle, make it less brittle or remove it.
6. Use testing to expose poor domain design. See testing as a domain design exercise first, and a means to catch regressions secondarily.
7. Avoid snapshot testing and shallow testing (unless you have no other choice)
8. Always prefer factories over seeds or fixture data.
9. Continuous integration runs on every commit and on every PR.
10. Use testing and TDD to identify complected code and work to de-complect the codebase as you refactor.
Jason is an evangelist for returning the craft of software to its core elements.
Jason’s radical (‘to the core’ or ‘to the source’) understanding of what software encompasses: being engaged, showing up, doing the work, keeping the ego in check, and staying committed to sane defaults.
In addition to being a specialist in automated testing, Jason coaches small businesses and entrepreneurs in SEO and social media marketing.
Here, you can find Jason’s course material and writings about Rails, React, Javascript, Typescript, iOS development, TDD and automated testing.
Jason is a SEMRush-certified SEO specialist and his open-source Rails engines have been used by companies across the world.