use Perl

• Break it Up (Score:1)

  by chromatic (983)

  You have several options:

  • Leave those bits untested.
  • Break the problem up into smaller steps. Instead of building a string and printing it from one routine, break it into two routines, one that builds the string and one that prints it. You can test the building one automatically and the printing one by hand if you need to.
  • Use mock objects or packages or subs to test the printing or display routines.
  • Add more accessors to your graphics objects -- test that a certain set of pixels are correct or that th
  • Re:Break it Up (Score:2)

    by jdavidb (1361)

    You can test the building one automatically and the printing one by hand if you need to.

    Ugh, no testing by hand, thanks. :) That's why the question "how do I test a routine that prints something" still exists after I design for testing and break the routine up. The other ideas were good, though; thanks.

    --
    J. David works really hard, has a passion for writing good software, and knows many of the world's best Perl programmers
• Testing Strategies (Score:2)

  by Ovid (2709)

  Question: How do I test something graphical? For example, I have routines that are generating charts and graphs in PNG format.

  Answer: One way would be to pre-generate "known good" charts and graphs, save them in a test_data directory and, run your routines and see if the output files are the same.

  Question: How would I test a GUI interface for something?

  Answer: I've struggled with this and for the most part, I don't think there are good, generic answers. One suggestion that I've heard is to have t
  • quick and dirty GUI testing (Score:2)

    by gizmo_mathboy (782)

    What we did at an old job was get a known good image (chart, graph, or even a snapshot of the desktop).
    
    Then create a checksum (md5 is kind of small but I liked to use sha1). Then you just need to create a checksum on the test image and compare checksums, and then you could flag an image for human review.
    
    There was some other super simple things I came up with as well for images and rough UI testing.
    
  • Re:Testing Strategies (Score:1)

    by ferrency (4717)

    I've occasionally used another technique for testing the text output of legacy scripts to prevent regression while refactoring or fixing bugs. Redirect all output to a file, for both the new and old versions of the script, and then use "diff" to detect differences. This is certainly worse than fully automated testing, but much better than fully manual testing.
    
    Redirecting "all output" is slightly more challenging if the legacy code doesn't have the hooks Ovid recommends, but not impossible. Although "pri
• What kind of test (Score:2)

  by delegatrix (506)

  How would I test a GUI interface for something?

  Do you mean test that the interface does what you think it will on the back end, or test that the interface is usable?