On Nov 13, 2008, at 11:51 AM, Ean Schuessler wrote:
----- "David E Jones" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I don't believe I've ever been in favor of enforcing a rule requiring
new features to be accompanied by automated tests. In fact, I think
I've spoken/written against that a number of times.
Like you say, this may reduce contributions. The bigger issue with a
community-driven project is that people are motivated by a small
number of things:
1. what they or their clients need (strong)
2. social pressure from others in the community (semi-strong)
3. desire for recognition (fairly weak)
4. desire to create something good/new (fairly weak)
I don't think we should underestimate the fact that developing good
tests is as distinct a skill set as writing good database code or
understanding concurrent programming. One very tough problem about
required tests would be that many people simply don't have
experience with Selenium or any of the other test frameworks. This
is probably especially true as you get into more rarified skill
sets. Certainly there will be a few unusual people who feel they can
master everything but many people tend to specialize.
Thanks Ean, that's a very good point.
Maybe we could have testing play a more central and public role in
the project? Try and turn testing into an area that gets you instant
recognition? Also, maybe we can look for users that have more of an
interest in testing (ie. customers) and get them more involved in
core platform testing?
I'm imagining tests coming from 3 main sources:
1. people who want OFBiz to work a certain way, because that is what
they or their clients need (or want)
2. people who are just interested in QA and testing and would rather
work on that
3. those who get involved with an effort to define some requirements
and designs for OFBiz, and create automated tests according to those
(I've just started working on this, there's a new space on
docs.ofbiz.org where I'm putting stuff and I'll be writing some intro
emails about it hopefully soon, it's basically what I'm working on
today)
Especially as we get more tools in place I hope to see more pressure
on the mailing list where people are answering questions and comments
with "great, write an automated test!". I think this is along the same
lines you're thinking of. Actually, it could start right now. We have
great tools for writing service level tests, and in fact if someone
was bored they could even work on resolving some of the data
dependency problems that exist in those tests now.
Anyway, I agree. Tests need to be a more day-to-day part of the
project with recognition for having done them, and social pressure to
do them as well.
At the conference there were a bunch of people who are doing lots of
stuff based on OFBiz but have only contributed on a limited basis, or
not really at all. I was wondering if they might be interested in
participating in this way (ie for testing) and might actually be more
interested in that than in other types of contributions.
-David
