On Friday, May 03, 2013 01:34:35 PM Ovid wrote: > ... you'll have to do a lot of work to convince people that starting out > with an effectively random environment is a good way to test code.
Before you dismiss the idea entirely, consider that our real live code running for real live clients runs in an effectively random environment. This reminds me of the (false) debate over using mock objects to enforce some standard of unit testing purity. It's interesting if individual pieces of code adhere to expected behavior in isolation, but when the code has to work, it's not doing so in isolation. Isolation of individual test cases is, of course, essential to parallelization--but I'm trying to maximize the return on confidence for testing investment in what's inherently a stochastic process, so pursuing isolation between individual test units is rarely worth it, in my experience. Writing the right tests which test the right things is. -- c
