Chuck Hill wrote:
I believe a healthy combination of CVS-log monitoring (read them
daily and write good ones), JUnit et al, and black-box testing
(JMeter, HTTPUnit, et al) can keep an application functioning
properly in the face of frequently updated frameworks.
What if you have not touched the application in three years? What if
you have 10 or 20 such applications? Can you monitor all the log
messages and consider them in the light of what each app does and run
all the tests and still get work done? I can't.
I have spent significant amounts of time doing the above and getting
work done (assuming a developer's mentality of work="writing code").
This was in a shop of about 40 developers with daily reports of code
changes generated out of Clearcase. I watched for the changes that
impacted my area of interest (my apps, if you will). If I didn't
understand the changelog then I asked the developer about it. It helped
that I had the organizational clout to stick my nose into whatever I
felt like although many developers didn't appreciate having my nose
there :-).
Automated unit testing does most of (if not all of) the running of the
tests for you. I think linux.com just ran an article on Anthill which
sounds like a neat solution to automated building and testing of
applications. I agree that UI testing is a special case but an argument
can be made there that UIs should be designed with testing in mind (a
position I believe you have articulated in the past, Chuck). Even
15years ago the CAD/CAM company I worked for had automated UI testing.
It was unattended and usually ran over the weekend. Then there was the
week-long automated test before the tapes (yes, tapes, that's how long
ago this was) were cut.
Large organizations often have dedicated builders etc. In my early days
I was such and I built a automated build system with several thousand
lines of /bin/sh and sed (it was fun, if you can believe it).
Finally, if an app hasn't been touched in three years then I wouldn't be
the first one to open up that can of worms :-)
Just MHO and worth no more than the electrons that brought it to you.
-arturo
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