As a developer, have you ever struggled with a unit test suite that felt more like a burden than a benefit — filled with flaky tests, requiring constant maintenance, and slowing down your workflow? If so, you may not be writing valuable tests.

In this session, you will learn how to develop test suites that are genuinely valuable. We will start by exploring the core principles behind valuable tests — tests that:

- Are easy to maintain.
- Provide protection against regressions.
- Are resilient to refactoring of production code.
- Deliver fast feedback.

While these principles apply broadly across languages and frameworks, we will use C#, xUnit, and other tools in the .NET ecosystem to show how to apply them in real-world scenarios. You will see practical examples, patterns, and recipes that I use daily to write and maintain effective tests.

By the end of this talk, you will have the knowledge to choose effective testing patterns for your projects, ensuring your test suite adds real value, and a finely tuned bad-test smell-detector.