On Tuesday 21 February 2006 11:02, Lennart Regebro wrote: > On 2/21/06, Stephan Richter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Why is it random? It is taken straight from the conventions now used in > > Zope 3 for all new development. The rationale behind it is that you are > > forced to document and reason all the cases the software handles. > > Most testing I do is not about handling cases at all, it's about > testing specific functionality, making sure that old bugs doesn't pop > up again and stuff like that. Most of these tests would in doctest > format provide no documentation at all.
Ah, that is in the eye of the beholder. I would argue that bug fixes, for example, should be either tested by integrating text in the documentation or tested using a docstring test, which SchoolTool commonly does. The idea is not to say: "This test has been written to test the fix for issue 12234", but rather write something like: "A special case is XYZ, which works as follows:" Any test should provide documentation. > For my calendar, many of the > tests are test to do things as migrate data from the old calendar > product, making sure that the attendee source for CPS does what it > should, but it has no educational use in itself, Well, a doctest could explain the migration test and what has changed. SchoolTool, for example, tests its migration scripts using doctests. > the API for is is > tested in CalCore and CalZope and that is indeed in DocTest format (at > least partly), we also have tests to check that the translations are > consistent, and stuff like that. But for translation consistency you have a different test setup anyways. Doctests are for testing code, not translations or similar things. > Many tests require setup/teardown > functionality, which gets hard to do in the inherently linear format > of doctests. I used to think this way too until Jim convinced me that showing all the setup steps and teardown is actually useful to the reader. It shows how much is involved in getting a particular piece of code running. Alternatively, you can of course define setup and teardown functions when instantiating the suite. > For example, the upgrade tests need to create old > calendars at the setup. Each test then fills the calendars with > different types of data, and migrates the calendar. This migration > includes installation of the new software and replacing of a local > utility, which then needs to be undone before the next test. I would > eitehr need to duplicate this code many times, or test all cases in > one fat migration step, which would make it much harder to figure out > exactly what failed. SchoolTool solves this by simply storing an old ZODB database and then run the generation scripts, because this is what happens in the real world anyways. > It is indeed good practice to start your development with doing > usecases, expanding them to be doctest and using this to drive > dvelopment. But once the code has matured past that stage, I see no > reason to require that all tests should be doctests, or you should > need to convince people why doctests are impossible. It may possible > increase the documentation quality marginally, but it may likewise > lower the testing quality. I don't think our testing quality has decreased in Zope 3, since we switched to pure doctests. Regards, Stephan -- Stephan Richter CBU Physics & Chemistry (B.S.) / Tufts Physics (Ph.D. student) Web2k - Web Software Design, Development and Training _______________________________________________ Zope3-dev mailing list Zope3-dev@zope.org Unsub: http://mail.zope.org/mailman/options/zope3-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com