Testing Questions

[Nicholas Clark]

On Mon, May 14, 2007 at 02:08:38PM +0100, Andy Armstrong wrote:

> I guess the first step to that is to make your tests as data-driven  
> as possible. I'll typically have a big array called @schedule or  
> somesuch - full of test cases and a little bit of code that chugs  
> through them all. If you can add tests without writing any more test  
> *code* that'd be a good sign.
> 
> Once you're doing that it's much easier to generate tests from  
> whatever reference material you have.

I'm always surprised that so few people seem to do this. Often people I work
with write tests, and each is/like/... runs once. I like putting them in
loops or subroutines and feeding them data until they refuse even a wafeur
thin mint. Having this style of battery of tests has often exposed unexpected
corner cases due to the range of data tried.

Nicholas Clark