The Brown Bag Sessions were specifically created for Amihan team members to learn, share, and discover new knowledge and techniques in software development, cloud infrastructure, quality engineering and more. These are informal training workshops that happen regularly, and every team member, regardless of department or role, is invited to watch and learn.

For the most recent Brown Bag Session, our Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Dondi Imperial and Senior Software Engineer, Den Domingo, conducted a brown bag for the Fundamentals of Automated Unit Testing. Members of the Quality Engineering (QE) Team, Allan Isip and William Philip Paderan,  share their thoughts and lessons learned from the session.

Thoughts from Allan Isip, QE Lead

Starting your day with the thought of having a Brown Bag session, an opportunity to learn something new can really be as good as it can get. It’s like adding fuel to your fire- especially when the term “testing” is appended to the topic. Whether it’s functional or non-functional, Amihan’s Quality Engineering (QE) team is more than willing to learn.

Last Tuesday, I was one of the early birds who attended the session conducted by Dondi and Den. I felt a lot of excitement and anticipation for that session. The other members of the QE team also felt the same way as all of them have attended similar sessions in the past. The topic for the session? Unit testing. 

Developers usually do their own testing on the code written by either them or by other developers in their team. The testing requires coding knowledge to understand, and sometimes can be considered an underrated task to do. But it can definitely help a lot in maintaining the quality of our projects. Now some people might ask- what exactly is unit testing? It’s like unlocking your car door using your car key and making sure that it cannot be unlocked by your house key, garage door remote, or even by the key of your neighbor with the same car as yours. Simply put, it is done on the code level and there are tests on the tiniest of units on an application.

The session started off with Dondi explaining what is unit testing and how can it be implemented on the backend. It’s more technical yet at the same time, more flexible because it mostly involves the validation of the endpoints. Afterwards, Den followed it up with frontend unit testing using Angular CLI. This involves testing how each module or component on the frontend behaves before they can actually be deployed in the testing environment. Den’s part of the Brown Bag was also the closing topic of the session.

As a team, we always strive to improve the quality of our work and how we can improve our testing process in mind. After the brown bag session, we conducted a meeting on how unit testing can help our daily tasks in Amihan. We scheduled a separate meeting with Den and from there, further discussions on how to configure and do unit testing have been conducted. It went well as we are now able to set up and prepare the unit testing repo for our upcoming hands-on tutorials.

Since Day One, making improvements in our testing process is our ultimate goal. I believe that the QE team are working and communicating on the same page when it comes to learning something new, applying something innovative, and doing something exciting. We constantly strive to deliver quality applications and learn new methods in unit testing- all steps in the right direction. With the support of our software development and management teams, better days in terms of quality products, systems, and applications are on the horizon.

Thoughts from William Philip Paderan, Software Engineer

As a developer, I have been writing scripts without unit tests. This posed a lot of challenges with the way the code was designed and maintained, especially when dealing with bug issues. After the Brown Bag Session we held, I learned the importance of repeated testing and the different approaches. Here are just some of the things I’ve learned from the session:

• writing good and maintainable code with the help of unit tests which defines the cases/scenarios to handle when designing the code
• with the help of unit tests, mitigating future issues can be caught beforehand
• isolating bug issues in product deployment through unit tests
• In context with the first bullet above, TDD (test-driven development) method can help write quality code

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