Response to the Unit Testing Experiment

Good to know the implement is going to be OOP based. Nice to know someone else has the same general perspective. Except for Unit Tests, which I have been meaning to explore, but eh, I do my own tests.

OOP all the way . I’m just finishing up some background tasks like that Redux library, the AJAX tutorial, some other admin work, getting PHP5.2.0 compiled, etc and I’ll be ready to start on the initial game coding. A week away at best guess.

Unit tests are often seen as difficult to get started with properly – the actual process is quite simple, but it involves a certain amount of experience it can take practice to build up.

What I aim doing this evening (if I finally get the time!) is write the unit tests for your contributed Heuristics classes (TDD which is based on Unit Tests usually ends up forcing refactoring – why I mentioned it on the forum). I’ll heavily comment the tests if you wish (no extra charge ) so they’re easier to follow.

FYI – I should have the Simpletest library and tests committed to the new QS Library SVN repo this evening – I’ll get around to adding your SF account. Unfortunately I can’t make Simpletest an SVN external since it’s maintained in CVS but it will be the latest CVS version (I help maintain Simpletest so I always have the latest CVS version to hand).

Would a Simpletest tutorial be of use? I was going to start writing one soon to start getting developer documentation in place.

Well, you do write good tutorials, so it would benefit more than myself. After looking at the other unit tests, I think I understand how to make them. However, I’ve yet discovered a solid reason over my own test scripts. I suppose being able to output exactly how many tests passed and failed is a good thing.

Hmm. If I can get my hands on the library, then I think I’ll try to write a few of my own.

By the way, I broke the Unit test and have the patch for it. I haven’t commited it yet as I’m waiting until I finish a little bit more of the A* class.

Just grab me on the forums with any Unit Test questions . They do have a significant advantage, but it’s often not immediately visible. There was a time when I thought unit tests were wasting time – took me some time to see the benefits.