--- Michael G Schwern <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I've thought things like that in the past, innocent refactorings, and > broke shit. Especially since they have to be done by hand (where's > my refactoring browser!?) > > At absolute minimum, with a big ball of mud, you can do dumb high > level "exact input/output" tests of the sort which would normally be > frowned upon.
That's what we're doing at work to provide some measure of safety on a mid-sized app that we're cleaning up. However, that still doesn't address the issue that sometimes you absolutely don't want to run the code because some of the things it does can be dangerous or problematic, hence the (admittedly awful) hack of sometimes modifying the code to check to see if we're testing. That hack, however, is easier to implement than the innocent refactorings. Cheers, Ovid -- Buy the book -- http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/perlhks/ Perl and CGI -- http://users.easystreet.com/ovid/cgi_course/
