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by candiddevmike 604 days ago
What's useful here? There's nothing actionable, no way to quantify if you're doing "SMURF" correctly. All the article describes is semi-obvious desirable qualities of a test suite.
3 comments

You're not "doing SMURF". It's not an approach or a system. It's just a specific vocabulary to talk about testing approaches better. They almost spell it out: "The SMURF mnemonic is an easy way to remember the tradeoffs to consider when balancing your test suite".

It's up to your team (and really always has been) to decide what works best for that project. You get to talk about tradeoffs and what's worth doing.

I touched on this a bit up thread, but I just want to note that my intention wasn't to get anyone to "do SMURF correctly". My goal was to create an idea to compete with the "Test Pyramid" which, while a useful guide in an environment with limited or no testing, didn't lead to productive conversations in an organization with a lot of tests.

My hope is that this little mnemonic will help engineers remember and discuss the practical concerns and real world tradeoffs that abstract concepts like unit, integration, and E2E entail. If you and your team are already talking about these tradeoffs when you discuss how to manage a growing test suite, then you're you will likely find this guidance a bit redundant, and that's fine by me :)

> What's useful here?

It is up to the reader to figure out this one.