Testing & Veification of Packages (was RE: Image factoring)

Swan, Dean Dean_Swan at Mitel.COM
Wed Nov 13 00:52:16 UTC 2002


While I agree that the idea of including SUnits with a package so that
everyone who installs it can verify their own installation, I would
like to mention some limitations and undesirable features of this
approach, and see what others think:

  1) The code for the test cases can often be larger and more complex
     than the code to implement the package features.

  2) The test cases can take a LONG time to run for complex code.

  3) Some things are very difficult or impossible to programmatically
     test. (i.e. user interface code, networking code, etc.)

For these reasons and probably a bunch of others I haven't listed,
automated tests aren't always practical, or even if the tests are
written, the tests may not be appropriate for everybody who wants to
use the package to run.

I really like the direction that the image factoring/modularization
work is currently going (as in SM and DVS), but I also really like
that an "official release" image of Squeak like 3.2-4956 has been
fairly well excercised as a whole, and can be trusted as fairly
stable and reliable "right-out-of-the-box".

I'm not too excited about the idea of having to take an "official
release" of the Squeak kernel and add packages in my own unique
combination to get the image I want then have to spend lots of time
verifying my newly constructed image.

What does the rest of the community think?

				-Dean Swan


-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Rueger [mailto:m.rueger at acm.org]
Sent: Tuesday, November 12, 2002 12:41 PM
To: squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org
Subject: Re: Image factoring




Norton, Chris wrote:
> [ snip Colin's interesting discussion of splitting PWS from Squeak ]
> 
> You raise a bunch of good points, Colin.  But one thing that concerns me,
> even more than *who* maintains a package, is that there is no *proof* that a
> package will work, once you get it back into your image.

SUnits anyone?
Seriously, splitting up the image is a strong motivation to finally have 
at least basic SUnit tests for every package.

Michael




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