Philip Riecks
Founder PragmaTech
Erlangen, Germany
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Philip is enabling developers to frequently deliver software with more confidence through actionable tech content and hands-on consulting.
He's an indie hacker, frequent Southeast Asia traveler, squash player, padel newbie, and enjoys jogging in nature.
Area of Expertise
Topics
Testing Spring Boot Applications Demystified
Testing plays a crucial role in software development, allowing you to catch bugs, ensure your code functions as intended, and provide confidence in the reliability and stability of your applications.
However, testing Spring Boot applications can sometimes feel like navigating a labyrinth of challenges – from managing dependencies and external systems to crafting effective tests that reflect the behavior of your code.
Whether you're a seasoned developer or just starting your journey with Spring Boot, this talk is designed to unravel the complexities and pitfalls of testing Spring Boot applications and empower you to become more productive and confident in your testing efforts.
In this talk, we will demystify testing Spring Boot applications by providing you with clear explanations, practical insights, and actionable best practices. Philip will guide you through the common pitfalls faced by developers, share time-tested recipes for success, and equip you with the tools and knowledge you need to write comprehensive and effective tests.
Top 5 Spring Boot Testing Mistakes Developers Trap Into
Your Spring Boot tests are passing, but can you trust them? In recent years, most of your tests aren't written by you - an AI wrote them while you reviewed the diff. That makes testing more important than ever, yet for many teams it remains a neglected afterthought.
This session reveals five mistakes that silently undermine your test suite's reliability and your confidence in deployments. We'll tackle the tough questions: How can 100% coverage still miss critical bugs? Why is your test suite so slow? Why does everything pass on H2 and fail in production?
You'll see real tests that look correct but hide serious flaws: @SpringBootTest as the golden hammer, the hidden context tax of careless @MockBean usage, in-memory databases that fake production parity, @Transactional rollbacks that make commits vanish, and green tests that can never fail. Each pitfall comes with practical fixes: picking the right test slice, reusing the application context, testing against real infrastructure with Testcontainers, and challenging your coverage with mutation testing.
You'll learn to judge tests, whether written by a human or an AI, and ship with certainty instead of hope. Perfect for developers burned by production issues despite "comprehensive" test suites.
Joyful testing awaits!
The Need for Speed: Cut Your Spring Boot Build Times by 70%
Your Spring Boot test suite is a time thief. Every context reload, every unnecessary restart, every @DirtiesContext annotation is stealing precious minutes from your development flow. But what if those 20-minute test runs could shrink to just 6 minutes?
This session reveals the game-changing power of Spring's TestContext caching - a feature hiding in plain sight. We'll dissect how Spring decides to reuse or rebuild application contexts, expose the silent performance killers in your test suite, and demonstrate proven strategies that deliver dramatic speed improvements.
Through hands-on examples, you'll discover why @MockBean might be your worst enemy, how test execution order affects performance, and which configuration patterns maximize context reuse. We'll benchmark real applications, showing exactly where those 70% gains come from.
Stop accepting slow tests as "just the way it is." Leave with a concrete action plan to accelerate your test suite today - no new frameworks, no rewrites, just smarter
Testing Spring Boot Applications Demystified
Testing plays a crucial role in software development, allowing you to catch bugs, ensure your code functions as intended, and provide confidence in the reliability and stability of your applications.
However, testing Spring Boot applications can sometimes feel like navigating a labyrinth of challenges – from managing dependencies and external systems to crafting effective tests that reflect the behavior of your code.
Whether you're a seasoned developer or just starting your journey with Spring Boot, this workshop is designed to unravel the complexities and pitfalls of testing Spring Boot applications and empower you to become more productive and confident in your testing efforts.
In this workshop, we will demystify testing Spring Boot applications by providing you with clear explanations, practical insights, and actionable best practices. Philip will guide you through the common pitfalls faced by developers, share time-tested recipes for success, and equip you with the tools and knowledge you need to write comprehensive and effective tests.
Ship Fast, Sleep Well: Fearless Spring Boot Deployments in the AI Era
It's Friday, 4 PM. You push to production - then close your laptop and enjoy your weekend, confident no one from on-call will ping you. Sound impossible? It isn't.
In the AI-dominant era, shipping speed matters more than ever. But speed without confidence is just risk at scale. AI can write your code and even your tests, yet if you don't understand what to verify and where, you're automating your way straight into production incidents.
This talk shows how to make your test suite a first-class citizen: the safety net that lets you deploy fearlessly. You'll learn which tests matter while staying in control of what actually gets verified
But testing alone isn't enough. We'll go beyond the suite to the full confidence toolkit: feature flags that decouple deployment from release, runbooks for when things go wrong, and monitoring and alerts that catch problems before your users do.
You'll leave with concrete strategies to turn every commit into a confident one - and to make Friday afternoon deployments boring again.
Strategies & Pitfalls to Cut Down Your Spring Boot Builds by 70%
AI writes your code in seconds. Then you wait twenty minutes for CI to tell you whether it works. The bottleneck has moved: writing code is cheap, but verifying it - auditing AI-generated changes against a slow build - is now what stands between you and fast feedback.
This advanced talk shows how to cut Spring Boot build times drastically, often by 70% or more, so your pipeline gives answers in minutes instead of hours.
We'll work through the strategies that move the needle: parallel test execution, smart test slicing, reusing Spring application contexts, Testcontainers optimization, and build caching. For each, you'll see when it helps and how to measure the gain.
Just as important, we'll cover the pitfalls: the "optimizations" that quietly break test isolation, hide flakiness, or trade correctness for speed.
A fast build that lies to you is worse than a slow one.
This session assumes you already write tests and know your way around a CI pipeline. You'll leave with a concrete, prioritized checklist to take back to your own project and start reclaiming hours of feedback time.
Prompt It Right: Spring Boot Testing in the AI Era
AI now writes most of your test code, and that changes the skill you need. The bottleneck is no longer typing tests by hand; it's knowing what good tests look like, where each kind belongs, and how to prompt AI to produce them. Without that understanding, you get tests that pass but verify nothing.
This session gives you the full picture of testing Spring Boot applications, so you can direct AI with confidence instead of trusting it blindly.
We'll cover the complete testing pyramid: fast unit tests, sliced tests that load only the part of the context you need, and integration tests that exercise the real thing with Testcontainers. For each level, you'll see when to reach for it, what it actually proves, and how to prompt AI to write it well.
Along the way you'll collect practical patterns and recipes you can apply directly to your own codebase, plus the common pitfalls that produce slow, flaky, or misleading tests. We'll close with quick wins that improve almost any Spring Boot test suite.
Whether you're newer to Spring Boot testing or want to sharpen how you collaborate with AI tools, you'll leave knowing not just how to write tests, but how to judge whether the ones AI hands you are worth keeping.
The Spring Test Profiler: Cut Down Your Test Execution Time by 70%
AI writes your code in seconds. Then you wait twenty minutes for CI to tell you whether it works. The bottleneck has moved: writing code is cheap, but verifying it against a slow build is now what stands between you and fast feedback.
The biggest lever for faster Spring Boot builds is a hidden gem most teams barely use: Spring Test's context caching. Done right, your integration tests reuse expensive application contexts instead of starting fresh ones. Done wrong, every test class silently pays for a new context — and nobody notices until the pipeline takes an hour.
This talk introduces the Spring Test Profiler, an open-source tool that makes context caching visible. We'll start with the theory: how the cache works, what goes into the cache key, and why seemingly harmless choices — @MockitoBean, @DirtiesContext, dynamic properties — quietly multiply your build time. Then we get practical: using the profiler to spot cache misses and applying proven fixes, drawn from years of optimizing test suites across many teams, that cut build times by up to 70%.
We'll also cover the pitfalls: "optimizations" that break test isolation or hide flakiness. A fast build that lies to you is worse than a slow one.
This session assumes you already write tests and know your way around a CI pipeline. You'll leave with a concrete, prioritized checklist to reclaim hours of feedback time in your own project.
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