CppCon 2024

Scott Meyers has famously proclaimed that the most important general design guideline is to make interfaces easy to use correctly and hard to use incorrectly.  I don't dispute that this is one of the most important design guidelines.

However, in my close to 40 years of fighting in the C++ trenches, I'd argue that testability is by far the more important design guideline, and antecedent to both ease of use and performance (a particular C++ penchant).

In this talk, we will discuss what testability means, and why it is so important.  We will briefly discuss some popular testing techniques, but most of our time will be spent looking into items of testability that are rarely discussed, but are extremely important in practice.

The participant will come away with a greater appreciation of the "small" things that are often overlooked in the holistic view of testable designs and implementations.  More importantly, we will all hopefully start asking the single most important question about any part of a software system, big or small:   How are we going to test that?