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All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

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The problem with homogeny (in testing) 4 Comments More | Login | Reply /

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  • ... but completely bloody useless in my particular case. I mean, yes, the solution you mention is the right one. We're getting there *slowly*. There's a decade of cruft to clean out. Meanwhile, I don't want people thinking that testing is worthless because "they never pass anyway".
    --
    Kirrily "Skud" Robert perl@infotrope.net http://infotrope.net/
    • Frankly, this is part of the reason I try to keep all my web apps as CGIs and not using server-integrated web stuff like mod_perl until absolutely necesary.

      It makes testing a hell of a lot simpler.

      But back to Skud's case. Personally, I'm finding I'm using environment variables a hell of a lot more for giant testing sets (in my case, say 27000 tests in 80 scripts).

      That way I can factor out problems.

      For example, I want to be able to test as much of my app as possible, even without a working database setup.

      So I have a TEST_DB that isolates various parts of the scripts in SKIPs, and skips some scripts altogether, and a TEST_WWW variable that (if defined) specifies to do the web testing, and where the URL of the web location of the current testing context is.

      It bulks out the tests a little with all those extra SKIP blocks and stuff, but it's been worth it.

      On any new environment, first I run the tests without any flags to pick up dependency and syntax/logic/etc problems, then I turn on the web tests and run again, then when all that is fixed, I turn on the web tests and run again.

      And for full testing, the AUTOMATED_TESTING flag turns all of it on.

      • "then I turn on the web tests and run again, then when all that is fixed, I turn on the web tests and run again."

        That should read "then I turn on the database tests and run again, then when all that is fixed, I turn on the web tests and run again."
      • I guess my concern with this is that nobody would ever set TEST_WEB to true.

        *sigh*, it's a hard problem. And I recognise that Schwern's comments do indicate the Right Thing -- and certainly what we had at the last job where I got to dictate such things -- but unfortunately my current team didn't have such a thing in place before I started there and was getting away with it because the team was small. Suddenly the team doubles, the server starts groaning, and there's such a legacy of centralised developmen
        --
        Kirrily "Skud" Robert perl@infotrope.net http://infotrope.net/
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