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in reply to how to begin with testing?

On this thread, no one has, AFAICT, (yet) identified the, to my mind, seminal work by Langworth & chromatic - Perl Testing: A Developer's Notebook (sorry for the UK URL).

I'm sorry to have to say that I have to disagree with zwon - there are immense benefits to writing test harnesses for existing code - the principal one being the ease by which potential regressions can be caught and fixed before the code goes live - especially in cases where the maintenance is the responsibility of a (virtual) test team and the original developer(s) are no longer available. The sad thing is that, like Configuration Management (CM), most employeres/clients don't/won't see the benefits until the problem has bitten them (frequently, more than once).

You say ...compiled .exe, so they won't be running the test harness at all... - just because your end-user won't run the test harness shouldn't preclude your writing one and running the deliverable against it - testing is an essential part of quality assurance and altho' it won't, indeed can't, demonstrate that there aren't any defects, it should give you the confidence that, assuming you've written good tests, there is a significantly reduced probability of their existence.

From my own POV, I start by identifying and writing tests for...

Just my 10 pen'orth...

A user level that continues to overstate my experience :-))

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Re^2: how to begin with testing?
by puudeli (Pilgrim) on Mar 23, 2009 at 08:55 UTC
    On this thread, no one has, AFAICT, (yet) identified the, to my mind, seminal work by Langworth & chromatic - Perl Testing: A Developer's Notebook.

    ++ for this only. I wasn't aware that this kind of book existed so I ordered it immediately :-)

    (sorry for the UK URL)

    No need to be sorry, pound to euro exchange rates are very pleasing at the moment ;-)

    --
    seek $her, $from, $everywhere if exists $true{love};
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Re^2: how to begin with testing?
by BerntB (Deacon) on Mar 23, 2009 at 02:21 UTC

    I second that,.. Perl Testing was both easy to read and IMHO gave a lot to my personal development quality. Really good value for money. (-: Talking about money, was that an URL that you get money when people buy? Never mind. :-)

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