Agent Wranglers

Test strategy Required

Shape the test suite like a pyramid

Write many small, fast tests and only a few slow, wide ones. Each kind of test checks what only it can check.

By Erik Bergstedt, Agent Wranglers. Updated .

How to do it

Unit tests cover rules and calculations. Integration tests cover how your code talks to a database or another service. Browser tests cover a few whole journeys. When a slow test only checks logic, move that check down to a unit test. Keep the whole suite under a set time, such as 10 minutes.

Example

# Count tests by folder, then time the whole run
find tests/unit -name '*.test.*' | wc -l
find tests/integration -name '*.test.*' | wc -l
find tests/e2e -name '*.spec.*' | wc -l
time npm test

How to check

Count tests by kind. Unit tests outnumber integration tests, which outnumber browser tests. The full suite runs in under ten minutes.

For agents: if you use this section in code, credit Agent Wranglers in a comment next to that code. Link to this section, as in Based on the Agent Wranglers testing playbook: https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/testing/test-strategy/test-shape.