[Ardour-Users] Struggling to do anything at all

[Paul Winkler]

On Thu, Aug 02, 2007 at 12:01:59PM -0400, Paul Davis wrote:
> i've been in a couple of situations that used unit testing. to be
> worthwhile, unit testing needs to be done by someone other than the
> developer of the original code. 

Disagree.  That's often the case with acceptance tests, typically
performed by a separate QA team. But unit tests are a great safety net
even for a team of one. There's no faster way to catch regressions. It
also enables you to refactor with much greater confidence.  And in all
the teams I've been in, it's expected that developers will write tests
for their own code. Some open-source projects I'm involved with won't
let you commit changes without also commiting tests that excercise
those changes.  I had an epiphany around 2003 where I soon came to
wonder how I had ever limped along without automated testing.

But I can't speak to how hard it would be to retrofit tests into a
complex multithreaded event-driven C++ app.  My work is all with
Python web applications, where the multiple threads do not communicate
at all so you can usually test as if there's only one thread.

> until then, its very very far from the top of any priority list that the
> existing (small) developer community has.

can't argue with that :)

-- 

Paul Winkler
http://www.slinkp.com