Re: Re: Difficult code (Resolutions)

[adrianh]

Two more good questions to ask a new codebase are:

• Are there acceptance tests? If not, how do we know what the application should do, and whether it is actually doing it. We should consider writing some.
• Are there unit tests? If not, how do we know what each module should do, and whether it is actually doing it. We should consider writing some.

[markguy]

I'm not sure this is new information for anyone, but here's a brief summary of what unit and acceptance tests are and what they try to save you from.

If anyone has other (and ideally more useful) links regarding practical, real-world examples of testing, I for one would appreciate seeing them.

[adrianh]

Testing's been discussed quite a bit on perlmonks in the past. Take a look at:

• (tye)Re: one-liner hogs
• The Joy of Test
• Regression testing with dependencies
• Automated software testing: emulation of interfaces using Test::MockObject
• Unit Testing Generated HTML
• What goes in a test suite?
• Further adventures with testing
• Small test harness for testing basic auth
• Perl Testing and Quality Assurance

[markguy]

Thanks for the links... it's good to have something to read as opposed to flounder along.

And this isn't directed specifically to you and could well be in your provided links, but what I'd really like to see is a start-to-finish walkthrough of someone's test generation on something simple, yet real world-ish. Reason being I don't yet have enough of a grasp to successfully evangelize the idea to the PHBs who are in desperate need of realizing it's benefits. And I literally do not have the time to figure it out on my own before my current project is due (and yes, I realize this is a bad, bad sign...).