Flow state, cognitive load, and speed of feedback loops are three core dimensions of developer experience. Taken together, they encapsulate almost all friction encountered in the development process.

However, these can be hard to measure and sometimes straightforward to improve.

In this session, we show how tests, the test suites' quality, and running test experience cover all three core dimensions and enable high-performing teams.

We look at anti-patterns for tests and how they drastically increase the cognitive load required even for the most straightforward changes and slow down feedback loops.
Then we show how modern high-quality test setups ensure developer productivity and happiness and drive team velocity up and to the right.

Below is the small print and not part of the abstract:

Some useful materials:
* https://www.infoq.com/presentations/thoughtworks-high-performance-teams/
* https://martinfowler.com/articles/developer-effectiveness.html
* https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3595878

We'll show testcontainers based setups for test -- ensuring environment parity, ease of running individual tests, flexibility of configuration, debuggability of the tests; talk about performance improvements to test suites, how higher level integration tests aren't too tied to implementation details allowing easier changes, and how they give a lot of confidence without requiring too much maintenance.