Re: Loose Guidelines

in reply to Loose Guidelines
in thread Testaholics Anonymous (or how I learned to stop worrying and love Test::More)

The test suite will run slower, and with 2,500 tests, that is going to become an issue.

I have serious issues with this line of thought. In my opinion, one should run every test that deals with any piece of code that has a 0.00001% chance of dealing with the code you changed since the last time you ran a full test suite.

Now, my codebase is broken up into 23+ Perl distributions (each its own CVS project) and 4 other CVS projects containing Oracle DDL, templates, and the like. The projects have a definite hierarchy (which is delineated in every distributions Makefile.PL). If I change some code in XXX::Foo and YYY::Foo depends on XXX::Foo, I need to run the tests in both XXX::Foo and YYY::Foo. Period. There's just no way around that.

Now, I don't have to run the tests for XXX::Foo if YYY::Foo changes, and the test suites need to be flexible enough to handle that. But, I think it's foolish to complain about test suite size or the time to run it. You have tests for a reason. Don't sabotage yourself just because you're impatient. It may be a virtue, but so is patience.

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Then there are Damian modules.... *sigh* ... that's not about being less-lazy -- that's about being on some really good drugs -- you know, there is no spoon. - flyingmoose

Comment on Re: Loose Guidelines

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Re: Re: Loose Guidelines by pbeckingham (Parson) on Apr 01, 2004 at 01:39 UTC
Please bear in mind that I was referring to redundant tests slowing the test suite. Redundant is being used here to mean unnecessary. If you are advocating more tests, each of which increases coverage to some degree, then I am in agreement with you. Redundancy in the test suite - by definition - is pointless, and serves to lengthen the wait every time it is run, and that will multiply up and become, as I said, an issue.	[reply]

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Re: Re: Loose Guidelines
by pbeckingham (Parson) on Apr 01, 2004 at 01:39 UTC

Please bear in mind that I was referring to redundant tests slowing the test suite. Redundant is being used here to mean unnecessary. If you are advocating more tests, each of which increases coverage to some degree, then I am in agreement with you.

Redundancy in the test suite - by definition - is pointless, and serves to lengthen the wait every time it is run, and that will multiply up and become, as I said, an issue.

[reply]

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