On 17 March 2011 18:42, Vamsee Kanakala <vkanak...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Thursday 17 March 2011 05:38 PM, steve wrote: > > On 03/15/2011 02:35 PM, Asokan Pichai wrote: > >> > >> A curiosity question: like make, is there a facility to run only those > tests > >> that correspond to > >> changed code. Even as I type this the question seems ill-defined etc., > but > >> still .... > >> > > Umm, that kinda defeats the purpose of TDD. When you run the test suite > > basically, the intention is to know that you haven't inadvertently broken > > something that you thought was unrelated by your latest changes. >
One of the reasons I added the `ill-defined' in my post. This seems an interesting problem though. --One does want to ensure that a change has not broken anything, but can that be done by ONLY testing where a breakage is possible? Sounds really hard problem to solve. > The purpose of TDD is not to check if anything has broken in the app. > That's the purpose of unit/developer testing in general. Running the > whole test suite every time you add/modify a test is going to be > seriously time-consuming (which refers to my 20-sec lag). TDD's purpose > on the other hand is to allow the discovery of the most > simplified/testable interface to your app. In other words, TDD is more > about application design than reliability. Of course, it ends up helping > the latter anyway. Yeah; TDD is not just regression testing. But using such labels which were defined in a context where coders wrote code and testers tested that code is one of the areas of some confusion in the understanding of TDD at least to me, for a time. I tend to think of TDD as exploratory development and best suited for those situations when part of the solution is NECESSARY for defining the problem itself and/or the exact approach to solution is yet unclear. Thoughts? -- Asokan Pichai *-------------------* We will find a way. Or, make one. (Hannibal) _______________________________________________ ILUGC Mailing List: http://www.ae.iitm.ac.in/mailman/listinfo/ilugc
