Ken Sedgwick writes: > Is there a regression testing suite for Freenet? [...] I would > like to start building one if this effort is not already > underway ...
I'm pretty new to the list, but I'm fairly sure they don't have a full-blown regression test suite yet. The "Serapis" simulation stuff seems to be closely related, though. That should be a good place to start looking. Must... fight... urge... to be... verbose... (Loses fight, gives in to the Digression Side) One opinion: it seems that automatically generating regression testing scripts is a process quite similar to automatically generating user-activity logs for tutorial, help, and support purposes. For example, setting up a "record and replay" script for in-house testing is similar -- if only in priciple -- to maintaining an ongoing activity log in the field. Such logs could be used (for example) by a bug-report program to help the user more quickly find the relevant pre-existing support files. This sort of thing is especially appealing to "free" apps that don't have a paid support staff to direct users to the manual. If no appropriate existing help page is found, the data could then be included when generating a new bug report. In this particular application, of course, we'll have to be extra careful about activity tracking. We certainly don't want some silently-generated plaintext activity log lying around the user's system without their knowledge. The "Start, Documents" feature in Windows comes to mind. <fantasy> I think it's possible, in at least some cases, that we could use things like activity logs and a carefully-crafted "program state vector" to automatically re-create the relevant aspects of a reported field bug. We might even be able to narrow down the problem by using the regression-testing trick of automatically running several variants of the regression test (activity log) with some parts of the script deleted. All this before the coder even looks at it! Some coding shops already do this sort of thing, and others at least have it in their future plans. Is it within reason to hope that we could do it here? The more the program behaves like a kind of state vector, driven by simple serial commands that perform a transform on the vector, the more this seems possible. Of course, many programs are not easily modelled that way -- at least not in their entirety. Hmm... </fantasy> In other words, when we develop a general strategy for regression testing, we may want to simultaneously develop a strategy for things like user bug reports. I am willing to help work on regression testing & related stuff. Contact me privately if you wish. --Will willdye at freedom.net _______________________________________________ Freenet-dev mailing list Freenet-dev at lists.sourceforge.net http://lists.sourceforge.net/mailman/listinfo/freenet-dev
