I signed up for the FlowCon 2014 conference in San Francisco this September. It's a two day event about software development and how we can do better. My job is starting to encompass more work in this area, and I'm excited to go see some of the ThoughtWorks developers talk about what they do well. Part of the reason I wanted to go came after watching a few videos from last year, including this one from Randy Shoup.

There are some interesting things in the talk, but one thing really caught my eye at the 9:52 mark. Mr. Shoup made a statement that "tests help you go faster" and "the best investment you can make in your own code ...[are] tests for your code." Those statements are a short part of the talk, but they make a lot of sense to me.

It's easy to ignore testing, after all, it's hard to test for everything that can possibly happen, and writing tests can be extremely tedious. However building tests JIT, when you find bugs or problems, can give you good code coverage, especially in the areas where you find developers are likely to make mistakes.

And like with all other software development skills, the more you work on writing tests, the easier, and faster you become at building them.