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Real World Testing of PL/SQL Code - An Office Hours Session

Since February 2019, I've been running, with Chris Saxon, on my team of Developer Advocates, monthly PL/SQL Office Hours sessions. They generally consist of short presentations on a PL/SQL-related topic, followed by lots of interesting discussion - between Chris and I, with attendees on the session, and with other speakers.

On November 5 at 9 AM Eastern, I am very pleased to have a session focused on testing PL/SQL code, featuring developers who are doing it out there in the "real world."

No application will ever have zero bugs, but you sure want to keep them to a minimum. The best way to do this is to implement automated regression tests of your code, but "best" as usual does not equate to "easiest." Building and managing tests can be a big challenge, so in this Office Hours session, we will hear from developers who are doing just that. Learn from your peers about the obstacles they faced and how they overcame them. Bring your own stories and your questions, and let's all work together on improving our code quality!

Our first presenter will be Jasmin Fluri.
Ms. Fluri is an independent consultant at Schaltstelle GmbH and lectures on software engineering and code review at the University of Applied Sciences North-western Switzerland. Her focus as a database developer and DevOps engineer lies on continuous integration and delivery pipelines, automation of recurring tasks, PL/SQL development, data engineering, and data warehousing.

We will then hear from Maik Becker and Swathi Ambati of Triology.
"We had a requirement where we used to write unit tests for legacy code and we used utPLSQL framework. We have developed an App to save test results and to run multiple tests at once without writing any execution code and also show the result in a very efficient manner. Since the project was an APEX App, we decided to use APEX as well to run tests and visualize results."

Deepthi Bandari, a senior software engineer at Fidelity Investments, will share some of her joys and challenges when it comes to unit testing, test automation and promoting engineering excellent.

And they are not all! We'll hear from Patrick Barel, who is a PL/SQL Developer for Qualogy in the Netherlands. Besides working with SQL and PL/SQL he wrote different plug-ins for PL/SQL Developer, publishes articles on his own blog and is an Oracle ACE Director. Patrick is going to show what he's been doing with SQL Developer unit testing features and SQLcl commands.


We will also be joined by Samuel Nitsche, one of the core maintainers of utPLSQL:
Samuel Nitsche is a curiosity-driven software-developer with nearly 20 years of development experience, working at Smart Enterprise Solutions GmbH, a small software company in southern Germany. In his free time he writes regularly about database development and testing topics, presents at meetups and conferences (gladly in sith-robe) and works on making the framework "even more awesome."

If you have been doing any kind of automated regression testing of your Oracle Database code, we'd love to hear from you, whether you are using SQL Developer integrated unit testing, utPLSQL, Quest Code Tester, another open source framework...or even (especially!) your own "homegrown" approach.

All our welcome. Please do get in touch if you'd like to present your experiences.

Subscribe for reminders at the PL/SQL Office Hours home page so that you can get email reminders about this and other sessions!

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