--- Andy Lester <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > One of the drums I beat heavily in my discussion of testing of large > projects is that you shouldn't care how long your tests take, so long as > they run within the smokebot window.
Sorry Andy, I can't quite agree with you on this one. Technically, you're 100% correct. The reality, though, is that when I'm trying to convince other programmers that they want to run the entire test suite before they check things in, I don't want to see them wince when I say that. The suite that I mentioned that takes over an hour to run is for *one* of our projects. We have many projects. Guess what happens when someone changes code that's shared with all projects? We are talking about many hours of tests. Programmers who "just know" that there change didn't break anything are faced with the prospect of several hours of tests, just to find out that they broke a couple of things, need to go in and fix it and then run several *more* hours of tests. When they made a 15 minute change and are looking at a couple of workdays to get it moved into production, they skip the tests. And yes, we've been bit by this :) The way we're doing tests is simply foolish and we could experience some significant productivity gains if we were to improve the test performance. Of course, I think it's fair to point out that much of the performance is due to a poorly thought out testing strategy. If the tests were designed better, I'd have less room to complain about how long they take to run. Cheers, Ovid ===== Silence is Evil http://users.easystreet.com/ovid/philosophy/indexdecency.htm Ovid http://www.perlmonks.org/index.pl?node_id=17000 Web Programming with Perl http://users.easystreet.com/ovid/cgi_course/ __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? The New Yahoo! Shopping - with improved product search http://shopping.yahoo.com
