15th January 2018: Dave Liddament brings us The Test Suite Holy Trinity and Andy Collington gives A Gentle Introduction to JWT

January 4, 2018 Article

Happy New Year BrightonPHPers! I hope you all had a good Christmas, and are full of enthusiasm to be back at work. Here at BrightonPHP we’re going to get off to a great start with two great talks for you on Monday January 15th 2018, at the normal venue of The Student Room by Brighton station. First up, we’ve got Dave Liddament bringing us The Test Suite Holy Trinity and then Andy Collington will be giving A Gentle Introduction to JWT.

Turn up from 18:15, the first talk will start around 19:15, and we’ll have the normal beer and pizza and general chit-chat between talks. Details of the venue are on this Meetings page if you haven’t been before, and do spread the word on Facebook if you’re looking forward to it as much as we are.

Dave Liddament – The Test Suite Holy Trinity

What would the perfect test suite look like? Well it would definitely fully test every bit of functionality. It would run lightning fast. And the test suite would be quick to write. That sounds great right?

Unfortunately these 3 goals work against each other. Increasing test coverage will increase the time spent writing and executing tests. Reducing test execution time will result in lower coverage.

This talk look at the properties of unit, integration and system tests in terms of what they test, how fast they run and how quick they are to write. Will look at how to get the most out of testing at each of these levels, how best to architect code for testing and where best to make compromises. Although by the end of the talk we won’t have quite achieved the Test Suite Holy Trinity, we’ll be a step closer.

Dave is a director and developer at Lamp Bristol, a software consultancy. He’s been writing software commercially for over 15 years in many languages including C, Python, Java and PHP. Dave is keen to pass on his knowledge. He is an organiser and regular speaker at PHP-SW. He also runs a monthly workshop that covers topics including testing, CI and git. When not busy coding Dave enjoys scuba diving and running.

Andrew Collington – A Gentle Introduction to JWT

JSON Web Tokens – or JWTs – are a handy way of representing claims between two parties, wrapped up in a JSON object and digitally signed. Sounds a bit complex, but it’s really not! This gentle introduction will hopefully show you just how easy they are to create and use.

Andy is a developer at Elucidat, creators of an award-winning e-learning authoring tool.  He’s been involved in web development for as long as his memory allows him to remember, and still enjoys it to this day.