+1


>From: "Ralph Johnson" <johnson at cs.uiuc.edu>
>Reply-To: The general-purpose Squeak developers 
>list<squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org>
>To: "The general-purpose Squeak developers 
>list"<squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org>
>Subject: Tests and software process
>Date: Wed, 1 Nov 2006 07:30:30 -0600
>
>Squeak comes with a large set of SUnit tests.  Unfortunately, some of
>them don't work.  As far as I can tell, there is NO recent version of
>Squak in which all the tests work.
>
>This is a sign that something is wrong.  The main purpose of shipping
>tests with code is so that people making changes can tell when they
>break things.  If the tests don't work then people will not run them.
>If they don't run the tests then the tests are useless.  The current
>set of tests are useless because of the bad tests.  Nobody complains
>about them, which tells me that nobody runs them.  So, it is all a
>waste of time.
>
>If the tests worked then it would be easy to make a new version.
>Every bug fix would have to come with a test that illustrates the bug
>and shows that it has been fixed.  The group that makes a new version
>would check that all tests continue to work after the bug fix.
>
>An easy way to make all the tests run is to delete the ones that don't
>work.  There are thousands of working tests and, depending on the
>version, dozens of non-working tests.  Perhaps the non-working tests
>indicate bugs, perhaps they indicate bad tests.  It seems a shame to
>delete tests that are illustrating bugs.  But if these tests don't
>work, they keep the other tests from being useful.  Programmers need
>to know that all the tests worked in the virgin image, and that if the
>tests quit working, it is there own fault.
>
>No development image should ever be shipped with any failing tests.
>
>-Ralph Johnson
>

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