On Monday 22 February 2010 23:18:04 Martin Pool wrote: > On 22 February 2010 20:40, Julian Edwards <[email protected]> wrote: > >> imo you are either writing doc tests or you're writing testable > >> documentation; they are not the same thing at all and it's hard to > >> make one document work for both. > > > > I have exactly the opposite opinion :) > > > > I'd like to see an example of why you think it's hard though? > > A good test suite should exercise every distinct domain of the > interface, trying to break it, paying attention to edge cases. You > expect them to all fail at least once so it's good to make them pretty > fine grained and perhaps to use validating decorators or something > else that will check internals or be faster, and perhaps to use > infrastructure to apply the same test in many different situations. > Having the output from one test feed into the next is generally poor > because you get cascading confusion. > > Whereas for documentation you want someone to be able to read it from > start to end, which means it should have a kind of narrative, show the > typical cases, not the obscure ones, and showing the typical way to > use the object, not a special setup for testing. > > At least that's how it seems to me. If you have an example of a > something that works really well for both at once I would be happy to > see it. >
Ah, I am absolutely not advocating that a doc test does both, you're basically in agreement with me with your first two paragraphs here. I think our lines got crossed somewhere. For me, a doctest for a model object tells me how to use it. The obscure corner cases can go in the unit tests. J _______________________________________________ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~launchpad-dev Post to : [email protected] Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~launchpad-dev More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
