The Most Important C++ Design Guideline is Testability
Talkat CppCon 2024 · on Monday, 2024-09-16· at 15:15· Adams A, 6700 North Gaylord Rockies Boulevard·
summary
Argues testability is the top design goal, not just unit tests, and backs it with tactics and failures: a standard-compliant expose private members via template trick for hard-to-test hidden state, using libclang + property-based tests and fuzzing to generate CI checks, and preferring end-to-end system tests over isolated units. Cites a production outage that sends roughly 4 million executions in 45 minutes from 212 retail orders and a botched 7-of-8 deployment, shows rollbacks can make things worse, and insists on automated deployments and monitored event logs.
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chapters (10)
- 0:00Introduction
- 3:54Testability over unit tests
- 12:38Hidden state and testing
- 17:36Knuth on testing
- 22:50Strong types for testability
- 25:43Most important C++ slide
- 27:11Knight Capital incident
- 46:56Knight Capital failure analysis
- 52:37Automating design tests
- 57:16Testability takeaways
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