autotest reminding you to test one thing at a time 2

Posted by Tim Connor Wed, 01 Nov 2006 05:16:00 GMT

I was fixing a bug via TDD (Test Driven Development) and having a bit of trouble. I couldn’t quite get my test to test for the conditions that prevented the bug. As I went upstairs to grab a snack, I realized that my problems was I was conflating two tests together.

I use autotest a lot, but sometimes when I’m doing something I shut it off, because I want to manually run one particular set of tests at need. With a system not quite speedy enough, that sometimes makes sense.

But, as part of my Eureka moment I realized that the reason I had turned off autotest, in this case, was that I wasn’t taking small enough baby-steps. I was breaking too many things at once. If I had tested for each individual thing, and developed by each small test, like I realized to do later, I could have kept autotest on without it blowing up at me.

  1. tieg about 1 hour later:

    Autotest is the new yoga! Make your testing intention your attention!

    I can’t remember if we talked about this, but one thing I’ve done lately that really helps scan the autotest screen is red/green colors for failing/passing tests. If you haven’t done it yet, you just put a file called ”.autotest” in your app or home directory and put “require ‘autotest/redgreen’” in the file. Not totally sure about working on Win32, though.

  2. Tim Connor about 4 hours later:

    I’m on a PC, so no, redgreen doesn’t really work for me. I do use the Snarl notifications (a growl knock-off) and hacked them so test notifcations stay on the screen ‘till I click on them.

    Since I don’t get pretty colors I changed the bar for redgreen to be a little longer, and made it jagged (/\/\) when tests fail.

    It doesn’t help that autotest obviously wasn’t written for Windows, and you sometimes get a bunch of garbage dumped to the console.

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