Hi Erich, Kent. There is a discussion going on in the [email protected] mailing list that I would like to invite you two to participate in.
I am copying a large number of mailing lists as the original e-mail forwarded below has triggered a lot of separate discussions, but I would like to ask that you follow Scott's request and respond only to [EMAIL PROTECTED] - Sam Ruby ---------------------- Forwarded by Sam Ruby/Raleigh/IBM on 02/12/2001 04:37 PM --------------------------- [EMAIL PROTECTED] on 02/10/2001 04:06:38 PM Please respond to [email protected] To: [email protected], [email protected] cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] Subject: Test Infrastructure Project Proposal Ross Burton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Having spent all day upto my arm pits in bits of cocoon, xerces and > xalan, I've come to the conclusion that tracking down bugs in bits of > cocoon can be nearly impossible at the moment. How would you guys feel > about us starting to use JUnit to run unit tests over cocoon? First, sorry for the large cross-posting. But I wanted to make sure this note is received by a large audience. Replies should be sent only to [email protected] (I'm not subscribed to [email protected]). Xalan being a project that 1) requires a *lot* of testing, and 2) is sandwiched inbetween Cocoon and Xerces, 3) is dependent on other technologies like BSF, and 4) is used in several other pipeline scenarios, we (i.e. the folks at Lotus who are involved in the Xalan project) have been doing a lot of thinking about this subject. What is happening in the XML/Web world is the integration of a lot of smaller components, plugged together via (hopefully) standard interfaces. This increases the need for unit testing, and integration testing in a big way. In systems such as we are building, robustness is everything, and fragility is becoming an increasing problem. I feel this is probably the most critical issue xml.apache.org and the Jakarta projects are facing, even above performance issues. The days have ended when Xerces can release without testing with Xalan, and Xalan can release without testing with Cocoon, etc. Also, I feel what we are all practising is pretty close to "Extreme Programming" (http://www.extremeprogramming.org/), by our very motto of "release early and often". Extreme programming is very reliant on having a *lot* of tests that are constantly run (see http://www.extremeprogramming.org/rules/unittests.html and http://www.extremeprogramming.org/rules/functionaltests.html). This means that tests must be very fast to create, easy to plug in, easy to have them become part of the perminant acceptence tests, running the tests must be extremely convenient, and diagnosing problems from the reports must also be easy. And when a bug is found by a user, a test should almost always be added to the acceptence tests (http://www.extremeprogramming.org/rules/bugs.html). We have analyzed JUnit and feel it doesn't address our needs, nor the integration testing needs, though we like it's Ant base. I propose a project for testing infrastructure, that covers the needs of unit testing, stress testing, performance testing, negative testing (i.e. testing of error conditions), integration testing, and error logging and reporting. I don't know or care if this is a Jakarta project or an xml.apache.org project. I believe the Jakarta project has been thinking somewhat along these lines? The Xalan project already has a fair amount of infrastructure that we would be happy to contribute. But basically, I think we should start first with requirements, then a schema for reporting (i.e. design the data first), go next to interfaces, and then decide what existing code can be used. Thoughts? Does anyone want to -1 this? If not, where should it live? (I suspect the answer is in Jakarta, next to Ant). What should it be named? What are the next steps? Who should be the founders? And what about C-language integration testing, as well as other languages (which might argue against a home in Jakarta?)? Again, sorry for the large cross-posting, but I think it's time for this issue to get full attention from all the projects. -scott Ross Burton <ross.burton@ To: [email protected] mail.com> cc: (bcc: Scott Boag/CAM/Lotus) Sent by: Subject: Re: [C2] Unit testing. [EMAIL PROTECTED] active.com 02/10/2001 09:37 AM Please respond to cocoon-dev Paul Russell wrote: > > Guys, > > Having spent all day upto my arm pits in bits of cocoon, xerces and > xalan, I've come to the conclusion that tracking down bugs in bits of > cocoon can be nearly impossible at the moment. How would you guys feel > about us starting to use JUnit to run unit tests over cocoon? That way > we can be a lot more confident that we didn't just break something when > we make a change? The tests can range from checking that a matcher > matches, to checking that a classloader class loads, to checking that > the output of a particular pipeline is as expected. I'm very happy to > help in this respect, and I have minions (eh, boss?) that will put some > work into developing tests, too. How do you guys feel about this? > > Does anyone know whether the IBM Public Licence is APL compatible, or > would we have to keep JUnit out of the repository? A small note - didn't the Avalon list seperate their testing code from the core and put it on Sourceforge? arrowhead.sourceforge.net IIRC. Ah - just went there. Yes, that is the site of the code (Kevin Burton is the developer) but there is no downloads, no web page, no nothing. Anyone know what happened? Did it get dropped? Apart from that, +1 for the tests. Ross Burton --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
