Test driven programming, was Re: VB to Python migration

[Grig Gheorghiu]

Magnus,

I've been writing TextTest tests lately for an application that will be
presented at a PyCon tutorial on "Agile development and testing". I
have to say that if your application does a lot of logging, then the
TextTest tests become very fragile in the presence of changes. So I had
to come up with this process in order for the tests to be of any use at
all:

1) add new code in, with no logging calls
2) run texttest and see if anything got broken
3) if nothing got broken, add logging calls for new code and
re-generate texttest golden images

I've been doing 3) pretty much for a while and I find myself
regenerating the golden images over and over again. So I figured that I
won't go very far with this tool without the discipline of going
through 1) and 2) first.

>From what I see though, there's no way I can replace my unit tests with
TextTest. It's just too coarse-grained to catch subtle errors. I'm
curious to know how exactly you use it at Carmen and how you can get
rid of your unit tests by using it.

Grig