What kind of builders do you use in your tests? Do you use the old good builders where properties are set by a withProperty method? Or maybe, you use builders that make use of closures? As soon as I joined my team, I found out that there is another approach to test builders, and it embraces maps. It seemed innovative, but after a while, it became annoying legacy code. After one of the debugging sessions, I decided to get rid of it, but the monster fought me back.

We all know that “there are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things”. However, we know that writing good tests is hard, too. Does it mean that the author of the famous quote is wrong? Not necessarily! In fact, what are tests? These are descriptions of some concepts. They answer the questions: “what?”, “when?” and “how?”. When writing tests, you are answering these questions by giving names to objects, reasons, and processes. I think writing tests is hard because it is all about naming. I believe you can significantly improve your tests just by focusing on giving them correct names. Let me tell you a story of a pull request I was reviewing some time ago.