Kath Young - Effective tests and testing effectively - Laracon AU 2025

In this talk, Kath Young breaks down how to write tests that are fast, meaningful and maintainable in real world Laravel applications. She covers the mechanics behind slow test suites, how to prioritise high value coverage and the differences between unit, feature and integration tests, complete with a live-action Lego demo. 📚 ## Chapters 01:00 Three themes for the talk: speed, coverage and testing mindset 01:40 How a test runs: framework boot, schema creation, data setup, external calls and assertions 02:58 Speed principle: build less and cache everything that will not change between tests 03:52 Speed principle: avoid heavy seeders, prefer factories and minimise database I/O 05:47 Speed principle: mock external calls, mail, queues and anything not under test 07:15 Measuring performance: log timestamps, profile your suite and optimise the largest bottleneck 08:06 When your project only has the default two tests, why that is an opportunity not a crisis 08:53 Coverage mindset: progress over perfection and thinking in terms of development plus testing time 09:44 Not all coverage is equal: identifying the critical 40 percent that actually matters 10:52 High use critical functions: the features your app cannot survive without 11:49 High use critical reputation: the flows that damage user trust even if they technically work 12:54 Bug spray mindset: break, test, fix as a team commitment to never repeat a bug 13:35 Preventing regressions by writing the failing test before fixing the bug 14:27 Incremental refactors and writing idiomatic Laravel to make testing easier 15:32 Do not test the framework anecdote: acting as, login events and learning boundaries 16:36 Introducing unit, feature and integration tests and their responsibilities 17:01 Live Lego demo with Gary Yeatman and Marty Friedl to illustrate testing layers 18:38 Unit test demonstration: examining individual bricks and their properties 20:51 Feature test demonstration: assembling towers and seeing where brittle pieces fail 22:03 Integration test demonstration: attempting to build the bridge and observing systemic failure https://x.com/MidgetK https://laracon.au