Pascal Welsch

Flutter GDE, CTO at PHNTM, Co-Founder of Wiredash

Pascal (Flutter GDE) had a 6-year-long Android background before he transitioned to ditch Kotlin for Dart and Flutter. At PHNTM he leads a team of Flutter talents delivering stunning user interfaces to audiences on all platforms. Pascal is a strong believer in testing and open-source. If you find any of his packages in your dependencies they are certainly well tested. Like his Feedback SDK Wiredash.

Flipping the Testing Pyramid - Smarter Widget Testing with Spot & Robots

When Mike Cohan introduced the testing pyramid in 2009, it made perfect sense for backend-heavy systems. But today’s Flutter apps are different: Most complexity lives in the UI. And unlike back then, we now have fast, reliable, headless UI tests: Widget tests. So why stick to outdated testing strategies, which only cover a small chunk of your app. Let’s learn how widget tests can easily cover 80% of your codebase, testing multiple screen sizes at once. The closer your tests mirror the human interactions with your app, the better for your users. Our Plan: 1. Pump your entire app: runApp(MyApp()); 2. Build Testing Robots (like Square does): This design pattern translates user journeys into clean, readable test code. 3. Debug your tests with the new package:spot timeline, which captures every frame of your test for debugging automatically With this setup, your widget tests become the backbone of your app, robust enough to survive even the biggest refactor. After all, app architecture is irrelevant from a user’s perspective. Pascal (Flutter GDE) has been building fully-tested enterprise applications since 2015 and is a long-time contributor to the Dart testing ecosystem. Key Takeaways: - Rethink traditional testing strategies from 2009 - Learn Full App Testing - Understand the Robot pattern - Debug widget tests visually with the Spot Timeline