Post #4 of 6: Make Your Checks Simple

If MetaAutomation is too much change for right now…

Make your checks simple, to improve scalability of your check runs with more resources and to improve the business value of your quality data. (OK, that’s “improve the quality of your quality data” and yes I know that might sound silly.)

There is a pattern called “Chained Tests” that occurs in the wild, and described here: http://xunitpatterns.com/Chained%20Tests.html but it’s actually a very bad idea. I’d call it an antipattern. The linked page goes into the negatives a bit, but I will add a more modern reason to NEVER chain your tests: they won’t scale. Chained tests must be run in a sequence, so it doesn’t matter how much computing resources you allocate, the check (aka “test”) run won’t go any faster.

As an extension of the “scalability” reasoning, make your checks simple. Each check should have no more than one target verification or verification cluster, and NOT have superfluous verifications that can either slow the check down and/or make it less robust and more fragile than it would otherwise be.

Here is a color version of one of the diagrams illustrating the Atomic Check pattern in the book on MetaAutomation:

Another way to simplify the checks, and make them faster, is to use the Precondition Pool pattern of MetaAutomation.

This page is #4 in a series of six, with the original post here.