Unit Testing: Building Confidence with Automated Testing

About this Course

How do you know your code really works? If testing requires running your entire system, tests are fragile or painful to maintain, and bugs keep slipping into production, you’re not alone. Many teams want better testing but struggle with inherited code, limited time, flaky tests, and slow manual processes that don’t scale. Even when integration tests exist, they often make failures harder to diagnose instead of easier.

This course shows you how to use testing as a practical, everyday development tool instead of a burden. You’ll learn how to design new code so it’s easy to test and how to add meaningful tests to existing code, even when it wasn’t written with testing in mind. The focus is on writing tests that are maintainable, reliable, and valuable, so they build confidence instead of creating more work.

You’ll learn how to balance unit and integration tests, choose the right type of test for the problem, and work effectively with hard-to-test dependencies like hardware and external systems. The course covers more than 10 types of tests, automation strategies, reporting, and testing tools. You’ll also learn how to simulate hardware, inject errors, and use tests to troubleshoot problems quickly. Object-oriented design techniques are used throughout to improve testability and clarity.

By the end of this course, you will:

Have fewer bugs reaching production
Recover from bugs faster when they do occur
Reduce recurring defects
Gain confidence that your code works
Be able to prove correctness to third parties

This course turns testing from a frustration into a competitive advantage.

Course curriculum

1. Welcome from Sam (1 min)
  FREE PREVIEW
2. What do you know? (2 min)
  FREE PREVIEW
1. Writing Simple Tests (1 min)
2. Exercise: Create Tests (1 min)
3. Tolerance ( 1 min)
4. Exercise: Refactoring Practice (1 min)
1. Characteristics of Good Tests (5 min)
2. Poor Parameterization (2 min)
3. Demo: Parameters Example (15 min)
4. Exercise: Parameterized Tests (1 min)
5. Thoughts? (2 min)
1. Avoid Overspecifying (2 min)
2. Stack Example with Categorization (5 min)
3. Given When Then (3 min)
4. Exercise: Testing a Stack (5 min + exercise time)
5. Rule of Thumb (1 min)
1. Intro to Session 2 (1 min)
2. Exercise: Yatzy Bug (1 min + exercise time)
3. Thoughts on Yatzy Bug (3 min)
1. Intro + Recommended Viewing (1 min + 35 min)
2. Environment Setup (2 min)
3. Follow Along: Hello World Approval Testing (10 min)
4. Review (5 min)
1. Complicated Output (1 min)
2. Complicated Output Verify Person Demo (7 min)
3. Rule of Thumb (1 min)
4. Approval Scrubbers Demo (10 min)
5. Supermarket Kata (1 min + exercise time)
6. Initial Impressions (1 min)
7. Test Utility Methods Demo (7 min)
8. Supermarket Approvals Demo (3 min)
9. Supermarket Approval Printer Demo (7 min)
10. Printer (1 min)
11. Setup Teardown (1 min)
12. All Together (1 min)
13. Supermarket Review (4 min)
14. Exercise: Supermarket (1 min + exercise time)
1. Built in Tools (5 min)
2. Gilded Rose Combination Approvals Demo (25 min)
3. Refactoring Practice ( 2 min + exercise)
1. Introduction (1 min)
2. What makes code hard to test? (1 min)
3. What is it? (3 min)
4. Safe Refactorings (6 min)
5. Exercise: Simple Serial (1 min + exercise time)
1. Spies and Doubles intro (1 min)
2. Backdoor Access (2 min)
3. Com0Com (3 min)
4. Com0Com Demo (16 min)
5. Backdoor Pros and Cons (2 min)
6. Alternatives (2 min)
7. HALS (1 min)
8. Examples (3 min)
9. Serial Spy Demo (3 min)
10. Exercise: Return to Simple Serial (1 min + exercise time)
1. LMock with Simple Serial (4 min)
2. LMock Serial (2 min)
3. LMock Demo (14 min)
4. Use LMock on Simple Serial (1 min + exercise time)
5. SAS Mocks (2 min)
1. Timing Test Doubles (2 min)
2. Demo: Timing Test Doubles (12 min)
3. Timing Exercise (1 min + exercise time)
1. Sam's Rules for Frameworks (4 min)
2. Presentations to Watch (3 min)
3. AF Unit Test (2 min)
4. Allen's Ideas Applied to DQMH (2 min)
5. DQMH Unit Testing Demo (5 min)
6. Frameworks Rule of Thumb (1 min)
1. LUnit API and Reports (3 min + exercise time)
2. Prebuilds (3 min + exercise time)
3. LUnit G-CLI (7 min)
4. Exercise LUnit G-CLI (1 min + exercise time)
5. Switcheroo (3 min)
6. Approvals Demo (12 min)
1. GUI Testing (1 min)
2. SLL Drona (19 min)
1. Resources and Reflections (6 min)
2. Thank You! (2 min)

About this course

$499.00
86 lessons
5.5 hours of video content

Take the first few lessons for free!

Shipping too many bugs to production? This course teaches how to design testable code, write reliable automated tests, handle hard-to-test systems, and reduce recurring bugs so you gain confidence, faster feedback, and provable results.

Get started now

About this Course

Course curriculum

Unit Testing Introduction (3 min)

Hello World! (approx 20 min)

Writing Simple Tests (approx 4 min plus exercise time)

Parameterized Tests (approx 25 min plus exercise time)

API Testing (approx 16 min + exercise time)

Writing Tests for Bugs (approx 10 min)

Approval Testing (approx 18 min)

Complicated Output (approx 46 min + exercise time)

Combination Tests (approx 90 min)

Pure Functions (approx 12 min + exercise time)

Spies and Doubles (approx 34 min + exercise time)

Mocking (approx 23 min + exercise time)

Timing (approx 15 min + exercise time)

Dealing with Frameworks (approx 17 min)

Automating Tests (26 min + exercise time)

GUI Testing (20 min)

Reflections (8 min)

About this course

Take the first few lessons for free!