To begin, let's not say I'm a fan of debuggers, nor am I an enemy of
test cases. I think they both have their place. I don't think that
avoiding an available tool is a necessarily a good idea.
Further, your claim below is somewhat silly, I think, unless you think
that all large projects, AOLServer included, is overly complex and
requires refactoring. I would suggest that it's strictly impossible to
make a complete set of test cases for AOLServer as a software project.
At best you can trail behind the found bugs, making test cases for each
of them, and avoiding them cropping up again, and make a set of tests
that test the *basic* functionality of the API commands.. If you don't
think this is true then man do I ever have a bet I'd like to propose. I
know that you're talking about the need for a debugger to debug web
applications, which you probably consider less complex than a project
like AOLServer, and I do too for the most part, but even web apps and
the like can get too large and complex to rely on test cases and ns_log
alone.
Rusty
Dossy Shiobara wrote:
On 2006.09.06, Rusty Brooks <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
It's funny... I know we're all experienced developers and that
therefore all of our viewpoints have validity, but to me debugger > test
cases. I am really doubting you are going to have enough test cases to
cover all conceivable reasonable inputs.
If your code under test is capable of doing so many things that you
can't create a reasonable list of testable items, then I firmly assert
that your design is overly complex and requires simplification and
refactoring.
Some truths I've discovered along the way:
* Good code is easy to test.
* It's really hard to write good code.
* Most code isn't easy to test, because it's not that good.
Then, if you drink the test-driven development Kool-Aid, you start to
discover:
* Writing tests first nudges you in the direction of better code.
This is not meant to be a barb, but, for example, do you have a
test-case that examines what happens if someone ns_returnredirects and
then doesn't do an ns_adp_abort before the end of the page?
We should have a test case for this, yes. Unfortunately, AOLserver
lacks reasonable automated tests, at the moment.
AOLServer contains a programming language and an extensive API, MANY
of the commands have unexpected interactions that you don't even know
about yet.
This is because much of the functionality lacks tests. This is
something we definitely need to address.
-- Dossy
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