[PD] regression testing WAS Re: [psql] object hand-holding

[zmoelnig at iem.at]

Quoting Mathieu Bouchard <matju at artengine.ca>:

> On Sun, 23 Dec 2007, Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:
>
>>> e.g. "fail_blabla" will only success if it returns the state "FAIL"
>>> immediately or after a "WAIT".
>> In a binary system, anything that doesn't success would be a   
>> failure. I don't quite get the WAIT state.  Do you have an example   
>> of where to use that?
>
> In most tristate electronics, the third state is WAIT, but in Pd, you
> normally do that by not sending a message: if as binary you'd send a 0
> or 1 while running a certain method, and want to introduce a WAIT
> state, you'd make it not output anything at first, introduce proper
> [delay], and only later send a 0 or 1 when it's ready. It's as simple
> as that. If the answer is not going to come, an explicit "wait" message
> isn't going to disambiguate nor solve that, so it might be a good idea
> to put some timeout protection *outside* of the tests themselves.

again, this suggestion is based on practical experiences with tests.
my first iteration of the framework did it exactly like you just proposed.

in practice i found it often simpler to write tests that only output a  
result when they know that they have passed: you need to create far  
less logic, which might minimize the chance to write buggy tests  
(which i found is inevitable)

likewise, it is often simple to have a shortcut to tell the framework  
that the test is known to have failed (most of these shortcuts could  
be avoided by splitting the test into several sub-tests; in practice i  
found that i prefer to write less tests)


apart from that, a mechanism to quit a test from outside after some  
timeout might be a good idea.


fgmad.r
IOhannes



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