Are your tests slowing you down?
summary
Survey results show many devs say writing tests slows them down more than running them, and 70% of surveyed Maven users skip tests; root causes split into three concrete pain areas: writing, troubleshooting, running. Demoed fixes use IntelliJ live templates and local ML completion, BuildScan/Gradle build cache, test distribution (Netflix cuts a 1‑hour build to under 5 minutes), predictive test selection from Meta, remote debugging and test retries, quarantining flakies (e.g. flaky test days), and deleting or rewriting brittle tests.
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chapters (20)
- 0:00Introduction
- 2:32Tests and productivity
- 4:38Why tests slow us down
- 6:04IDE-assisted test writing demo
- 9:16AI-generated test code
- 16:37Improving test quality
- 19:08Meaningful test failures
- 22:43Troubleshooting test failures
- 27:59Tools for test failures
- 33:49Flaky tests dangers
- 35:15Finding flaky tests
- 38:06Fixing flaky tests
- 42:23Why running tests takes too long
- 43:07Faster builds with caching
- 46:18AI test selection
- 48:26Faster individual tests
- 50:59Test code quality
- 52:24Automating everything for efficiency
- 53:05Testing time investment
- 54:09Tests as documentation
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