Every Thursday morning at Firstborn is “Scrummy Thursday”. For one hour, Firstborn developers present random topics to each other. Those are usually little, 15-minute presentations on projects we’ve worked or things we discovered, and it is meant as a way to share knowledge among the development team. It’s a nice idea, and it has been working well for a while.

Today I had a little presentation on how I used Unit Testing to help me refactor a part of Pepsi Spire (my most recent project) with some confidence. I’ve made the slides available publicly, and you can check them below.

Click the slideshow and press “S” to show the presentation notes, which will help make sense of what’s being displayed.

The content of the presentation is not anything groundbreaking (there are better unit testing introductions out there), but I thought I’d share it nonetheless. For the longest time, I’ve looked at unit testing with some contempt; it normally wouldn’t work with the kind of UI-heavy, animation-heavy, short-lived code I had to create. Still, this was an instance where unit testing helped me avoid trouble and surprises, and save time in the long run. And while this particular project was made in ActionScript 3, this is a tale that can be repeated on any given platform.