On Wed, Mar 09, 2016 at 01:23:40PM -0700, Davide Del Vento wrote: > For example, if you use a library for the first time, you will be > probably writing some "throw-away" code (maybe in ipython/jupyter) > to see how it behaves. Make those a unit test! You will have a test > on your assumptions. You might or might not discover a bug in this > (or future) release of the library, but you will make clear what > assumptions you have on it. If a test against the library fails, you > either have found a bug on the library itself, or find a bug in your > assumptions.
If you write unit tests for the library, please submit them to the library so all consumers can benefit from testing those assumptions ;). > Frankly, I could tease Trevor attitude and say "you can never know > if computers are right, so why bother writing good code? just write > what you can and hope for the best". I'm in favor of testing all the things ;), I was just guessing at the distinction Ashwin was making between unit tests for libraries and unit tests for applications [1]. I think the takeaway is that no test will ever make it easy to locate bugs without further digging, but that the more narrowly scoped your tests are, and the more testing you have on each layer of your stack, the less work that digging will be. I think most folks are on board with that, and we're just tripping over the “unit test” vs. “integration test” phrasing. > 3) Moreover, if you also do TDD or at least "test first", I firmly > believe… While I like tests, I think test-driven development is going to be a hard sell to folks who haven't written much software before. Robust test suites are much easier to sell to people that have been through a big, ugly refactor at some point ;). And for folks I don't work with directly, I'm more interested in the outcome (does your project have good test coverage?) than the workflow used to get there (TDD, or “tests grafted on as we have time” ;). Cheers, Trevor [1]: http://lists.software-carpentry.org/pipermail/discuss_lists.software-carpentry.org/2016-March/004042.html Subject: Re: [Discuss] scientific computing, HPC and tests Date: Wed, 9 Mar 2016 07:15:31 -0500 Message-ID: <CANLckLvD--xS+4B+X-vsW3_0kaqSBnGKX_c68zWkBW7rBbb0=q...@mail.gmail.com> -- This email may be signed or encrypted with GnuPG (http://www.gnupg.org). For more information, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy
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