A What Test?

We all know what happens when you make assumptions. Of course, when things are obvious to ourselves, we tend not to notice the possibility they may not be obvious to others. Mea culpa, I made exactly that mistake recently. But in my aspirations to teach software development, that provides me with a great opportunity. I …

Difficulties With Test Metrics

The answer to the question of whether we should write automated test suites has largely been settled. We absolutely should write unit tests, and possibly even integration and end-to-end tests. But as acceptance of this practice grew, and adoption became more widespread, a follow-up question arose; How many tests should we write? How do we …

A Model For Parallel Testing In Fortran

The other day, a friend of mine and I were working together to add some tests to a library of utilities he wanted to put together. He was keen to get some experience with my testing framework, so we decided to do some work on it together. He does a lot of parallel programming, and …

Kicking And Screaming

How valuable is code that runs fast, but can't be extended or modified? How can you be productive in a code base that's grown into a big ball of mud because that was how you made things fast? How much speed would you be willing to give up in the name of developer happiness and …

Like Miracle Grow For Your Garden

In the last post I did about the Vegetables testing framework I developed, I talked about how much of a success it had been. Now I've cranked it up to 11. I've now got what is effectively QuickCheck level functionality implemented in a Fortran testing framework. For anyone not familiar with QuickCheck, it is effectively …

The Power of a Testing Framework

I am now ready to call Vegetables a huge success. In my last post I discussed its design and construction. I am now using it in a project at work. The power and convenience it has brought us is huge. The design of Vegetables is such that its use highly encourages writing your tests in a …

Eat Your Vegetables

About a year ago, I was starting a new project at work using Fortran. For anybody who didn't know, the tools and libraries available to Fortran programmers are few and far between, and not particularly extensible or adaptable. But, being the testing and automation proponent I am, I went looking for a testing framework. The …