Tests and software process

Hans-Martin Mosner hmm at heeg.de
Wed Nov 1 22:05:16 UTC 2006


Ralph Johnson schrieb:
> 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.  
Yup. To strengthen the upcoming trend of "do something" I have
investigated all the failing test cases in a 3.9-RC3-7066 image. The
results are at http://wiki.squeak.org/5889 - please feel free to comment.

Incidentally, there are very few classes of problems which are
responsible for most failing cases:

One (which causes half of the failures and errors) is missing features
in the MVC implementation of ToolBuilder. In my opinion, the
MVCToolBuilderTests should simply clamp these down by overriding the
test cases which can not possibly work in MVC with empty methods.

Then there are a number of FloatMathPlugin tests which just test whether
a sequence of floating point operations on a huge number of pseudorandom
floats exactly yields a specified result. In one case, the result on my
machine is not equal to the result specified in the test, but in more
cases the pseudorandom inputs are simply not applicable to the
mathematical functions under test. This indicates a problem with the
test and not with the plugin.

There are a small number of SqueakMap and Monticello tests which I don't
understand. These should be checked by the developers.

One test (ReleaseTest>>#testUnimplementedNonPrimitiveCalls) should
simply not be a unit test. This is a lint test which may be valuable as
far as it concerns your own code, but unless we want a very rigid
release regime this does not make sense here.

What's left is a very short list of genuine bugs. Some are simple to
fix, others probably require intensive debugging.
Expect less than 10 failing unit tests in 3.9 by the end of this week.

Cheers,
Hans-Martin



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