Robert Walker wrote: > Brian Mcardle wrote: >> But as you point out, this is impossible. We'll say I never thought of >> testing for non-English characters in certain strings. All my fixtures >> are English, all my tests pass. One of my users creates a record with a >> 'รก' character... maybe nothing breaks. Maybe on a later upgrade, I add a >> new page, and that breaks. > > I was actually speaking in generalities. However, I still don't think > scenarios like you mentioned are worth the overhead of testing against > production data, which will be high. And, even then, you're still going > to have scenarios that testing against live data won't catch. In either > case you're going to discover the problem after it has happened. > > You're example illustrates this rather nicely. It would be easy to > overlook accented character handling if you not expecting them. Whether > you test against live data or not, you would not have prevented the > problem from happening. The error would have already had to have > happened. If this caused an error, and the exception notification was in > place to report the error, then adding a test (or spec) to prevent this > issue once know has the same effect as testing against live data without > the huge overhead.
Ah, a flaw in my logic. :) You're correct there. There is still the case where a new test might be introduced, which the accented characters would break, but it's even rarer than what I was thinking of. > That being said if the facilities were not in place to begin with, then > doing a "one-time" test against the data you have received up to this > point might be useful. Just not something you want to rely upon > long-term. This is more what I'm aiming for. The application has been live for 8 months now, and we have a significant amount of data. I'd love to test on it and see if it breaks, then update our fixtures to take the edge cases into account. After the "one-time", it only has to be run, maybe every month, or two months, but I doubt it will make much difference after the one time. Which is different from my original intention of using it in every test run. Thanks for your input Robert! -- Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ruby on Rails: Talk" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-talk?hl=en.
