----- Original Message ----
> From: jerry gay <[email protected]>
> i don't understand the drive to have unique test identifiers. we don't
> have unique identifiers for every code statement, or every bit of
> documentation. why are tests so important/special/different that each
> warrants a unique id?
Actually, if code is well-written, we *do* sort of have unique identifiers.
"Bob, you need to change &Customer::name to also show the middle initial". We
don't really have anything like that in tests unless we move close to the xUnit
style. TAP has no concept of this.
Unique identifiers are useful in that they can let you track changes over time
(many of us use source control history to understand changes over time for
code). It would be very useful to have unique identifiers to persist to a db
and create graphs of one's test suite behavior ("hey, we keep failing out
credit card tests. We should look into this more carefully!").
Cheers,
Ovid
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