[BioPython] Re: UnitTests

[Jeffrey Chang]

I've freely cut out bits and pieces of the original emails, and left the
parts that are most relevant (I hope).


On Mon, 17 Apr 2000, Andrew Dalke wrote:

> I had forgotten that when I've had QA support before, the
> QA tests were different than the developer tests.  Our QA people
> weren't coders, so weren't writing directly against the
> libraries, but instead did functional tests against what the
> user saw.  I had assumed that QA code testing directly against
> APIs would be the same as the way I write against, but that's
> a likely wrong assumption.

I think this is an important insight.  Testing code is written for
different purposes from various viewpoints.  For example, the testing
stuff that comes with Python is good for a quick pre-flight check to make
sure everything's working.  However, it's less useful for developers who
may want to isolate a portion of the tests that run against a part of a
module that they're working on, sacrificing (for the moment) completeness
for speed.

Testing from the end-user's expectations of the results is another story,
too.

But all this is obvious.


> And as she said,
> > We'll need all the testing we can get, however it's done.  
> 
> Combined with
> > I like the [test] coding decisions to be as automatic as possible
> 
> > PyUnit only claims to be a unit testing tool.
> and
> > I have no problems with others using a different approach.
> 
> means (to me) it should be easy for both QA and coders to add test
> codes, and if that isn't the same framework, so be it.  Working
> test code is better than less test code and a single framework.
> As I pointed out, it's even possible to wrap one unit test viewpoint
> inside the other, so how about I help work on a way to get the
> code I've got easily accessible to your UnitTest code?

Sounds like a good plan.  BTW, starship is still down, so I'm still unable
to get Andrew's code and integrate it with the CVS tree.  Do you both have
write-able CVS access, so that you can work on the main repository?


Jeff