Uri Guttman wrote:
i have a suggestion for a talk topic, table driven testing. let me know if this is interesting.
Yes, sounds like a great topic.
i have used tables of data (lists of hashes) to drive tests for some of my modules. ... it makes it easier to create many more tests with variations than doing it all by hand.
It also makes it easier for non-programmers to easily see what the expected inputs and outputs are for a test. They just look at the table and can ignore the rest of the test fixture. If they can grok a bit of Perl data structure syntax, they can even modify/extend the test pretty easily.
On a current project where I've used table driven testing in several places I have tables in the test module that are only slightly modified versions of logic tables that appear in the wiki documentation for the product. The next step would be to make the wiki table executable...or a renderer to output the data table in wiki markup.
While the syntax for Perl data structures is pretty concise, when you're building a large table, it still feels cumbersome, so something to sweeten the syntax would be a nice thing to have for table driven testing.
-Tom -- Tom Metro Venture Logic, Newton, MA, USA "Enterprise solutions through open source." Professional Profile: http://tmetro.venturelogic.com/ _______________________________________________ Boston-pm mailing list [email protected] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
