The importance of using proper naming in your tests

The Skystore project, which I'm the lead tester for, still has a lot of unreleased features, while the reason for this are beyond the scope of what I intend to talk here, one particular feature brought down an important, albeit obvious lesson: Naming matters.

One feature that has been worked a while ago, but is still unavailable, is called "playnext"; it's a simple feature: when giving out video playback information to the client, the server will include some information about what to suggest the user to watch next, some time before the end of the video, the client will display a little box showing that information with an easily accessible play button.

This feature has several tests along with it as what should be suggested varies in accordance with different conditions which have all to be tested and made sure the server is giving out the correct info and structure.

As an automation evangelist I've automated the shit out of this feature, every normal, erroneous, corner and edge case was covered and everything was saved into GIT, available to everyone and runs everyday on every integration environment - good times.

After client applications implemented their side of this feature and found it lacking, it was decided that a new feature would be implemented server side, it would behave just like playnext, but with a different structure that would better satisfy the needs of the clients giving more complete and extendable information a "playnext 2.0". Since different teams have different priorities and implementation times, it was decided that the two features would run side-by-side for a while, to preserve those who had already implemented the first version.

When deciding which tests would be needed, I've said to my minion responsible for it: "Look at the playnext tests, copy them, adapt to the new structure, see if there's anything missing or need to be removed and you should be done quickly".

Later the feature was developed and tested, approved and delivered upon the client teams. Then they noticed that there were several missing parts and it was mostly unusable.

How did this pass the tests? It was obviously broken! My minion told me "I did what you told me, I've copied all the tests I found, there weren't many though"

I've looked for playnext in the feature files, found only a couple of tests, but I know I wrote a bunch of them, what happened? I looked into one file I knew had a few of the tests and found the problem:

play next... play next play next....

There it was, in the tests I named the feature "play next" instead of "playnext", when searching for the correct name, only a couple tests had it.

This explains why he thought there weren't many tests.

So, when naming and describing your tests and features remember:

• Describe your tests using the correct feature name.
• Make sure to use the name consistently (ie: don't change the name mid way).

That's it. After this event the tests were corrected, the missing testes added, the feature was patched and integrated with and everybody is happy, hopping it's well received when available to a wider audience.