Highly Interactive Testing for Uninterrupted Development Flow

TL;DR

This paper introduces a library that tightly integrates testing with highly interactive development environments, enabling immediate feedback and rapid test reexecution to maintain developer focus during continuous program evolution.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel library that provides runtime test representations, allowing seamless integration with HIDEs and enabling subsecond test reexecution times.

Findings

Enables immediate access to testing tools within HIDEs.

Achieves subsecond test reexecution times.

Maintains developer focus during continuous development.

Abstract

Highly interactive development environments (HIDEs) enable uninterrupted development flow through continuous program evolution and rapid hypothesis checking. However, traditional testing approaches -- typically executed separately via CLI -- isolate tests from HIDE tooling (interactive debuggers, value and stack inspectors, etc.) and introduce disruptive delays due to coarse execution granularity and lack of runtime context. This disconnect breaks development flow by exceeding critical attention thresholds. In this paper we present a library that provides runtime representation for tests, allowing tight integration with HIDEs, and enabling immediate access to HIDE tooling in the context of test failure. We then describe development workflows enhanced with testing and demonstrate how they achieve subsecond test reexecution times crucial for maintaining developer focus.