Re: Fwd: Re: [Platemail-developer] Properties

[David S. <ds...@in...>]

>>I had a brief look at JUnit, however it seems more specialised toward
>>self-contained classses.  Do you know of anything intended for
>>system-wide tests?
> 
> 
> http://www.junit.org/news/extension/index.htm has a few things, none of which 
> I've really looked at in detail.  I suppose it depends on how you want to 
> test the system - JUnit can test larger pieces of functionality, but if you 
> want to run the test from the user's point of view then scripts and expect 
> are probably the way forward (for the CLI at any rate; there are some gui 
> testing tools available too).
> 
> My preference for these would probably be to standardise on expect, or perhaps 
> the python port of expect, which would free us from using tcl.  I don't know 
> how mature the python one is.
> 

I'm not quite sure here.  Expect is probably the best thing for 
user-driven testing, however this seems hard to write tests for, since a 
lot of this will depend on outside sources.

I suppose we could combine this with shell scripts -- ie copy over 
messages store files, perform some operation, and examine the resulting 
files, but then this is really in the domain of shell scripting. 
Perhaps this will be more useful when we have definite use-cases for the 
user, though actually coding the expect scripts would probably depend on 
having a more definite idea of what the input/output would be.

JUnit seems the way to go for less exposed things, like saving settings, 
however again it's hard to check that you're getting the right output 
without effectively reimplementing the code, which can't be right.  It'd 
take a bit of thought to make good tests I think.

dgs.
-- 
David Stocks
Institute of Perception, Action and Behaviour
School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh
+44 (0)131 651 3436