Re: [Wonder-disc] Unit tests are teh suck

[Ray K. <ra...@ga...>]

On Aug 24, 2009, at 10:38 AM, Anjo Krank wrote:

> Hi Ray,
>
> while units test are nice and fun to do, I kinda of question their  
> value for the general case. We had *very* few unit testable errors  
> in the last few years (with the exception of half of the NSArray  
> stuff in June, the other half was due to EOF making assumptions that  
> didn't hold).
>
> I'd way much more appreciate it if you could either flesh out the  
> Bug Tracker reference or example apps and harness them with selenium  
> test.
>
> That way, the whole suite of tools could be tested for consistency  
> without the anal-retentive testing of a constructor returns null -  
> which it, like, won't. Ever. Trust me.
>
> It would be *way* more interesting if the text of a button is  
> "Create Foo" if foo is the current object's entity and "create" is  
> the task...
>
> Cheers, Anjo
>

I am not sure why you are fixated on the example of this one method,  
Anjo. It is not a big deal. If something will trivially pass, is it  
important enough to even talk about? I probably just put this in, with  
a fail() call, to verify the test class was being run and then took  
out the fail() call to verify it was being run correctly.

And I know you value applications and examples for testing. But I do  
not agree with you about this. But, there is probably room for  
differing opinions in the group and it is probably not a great idea to  
work out all the reasons for this right now. I think that using  
examples and apps for testing has problems, not the least of which is  
that not everyone can get them to run. I know that you can always get  
them to run because of how you have your environment set up, but not  
everyone wants to follow your example.

On the other hand, we definitely can use more Selenium tests of the  
examples and applications. I had tried to create a selenium test of  
just the first page in the AjaxExample application and got it to work,  
but it was really a PITA. Perhaps someone can put up some working  
Selenium tests that run reliably, without timing or repeatability  
issues. It seemed to be simple, but it seemed very fragile to me when  
I got things to run. Not that I am not going to try to figure out how  
to use Selenium. I just need to have the time to work out the kinks.  
Or find documentation. Or working examples.

cheers - ray