Andy Lester Is My hero

[jk2addict]

Last week, on their way to the Pittsburgh Perl Workshop, Andy can Pete stopped by the RubberyCity PM meeting to talk about Testing in Perl.

Now, I'm no stranger to tests. Handel has a test count of over 11k, and I like to think that I'm doing pretty well for not knowing what I'm doing. If nothing else, tests save me from myself. :-)

One of the slides Andy had was something like "10 things to test other than code". While I knew you could test other things like servers, data, file systems, websites, etc, I've always concentrated on tests related to the dist they're in. It finally clicked for me today at $work.

Once again, I was asked to check a data vs. server thing. Part X has an image assigned, but is the image actually on the servers?

I've done it before, and I have no doubt I'll do it again. So, why not write a test for it as an investment in my future free time? Even if it's not an official test in an official test suite, in an official language, it still exists, and I can still run them on a whim.

[Anonymous Monk]

But if you write a test, why put it in a Test:: test suite? Put it in a monitoring service. You want tests that tell you that something is wrong, instead of having a test you run when you've been informed by an angry customer that "it doesn't work".

That's what we do. When we have a problem and we realize that there could have been a test for it - we write a test and have nagios check the output. Preferable of course, we have the test before we first run into a problem, but we live in a real world and that doesn't always happen.

[petdance]

The kinds of things I was talking about as far as checking the website were beyond merely checking to see if the website is up, but actually doing a login to the site and checking the contents of the page.

Another example was trying to log into the database with a default username/password, because I once got bitten by a DB upgrade re-adding default passwords, and I didn't know about it.

And jk2addict, I'm glad you liked it.