Comment by ChrisMarshallNY

Comment by ChrisMarshallNY 14 hours ago

> Release early, release often

I’m big on this.

I find it efficacious to have an integrated product going as soon as possible, even if it’s a field of stubs.

It’s my experience that I almost never know what the end product will look like, no matter how much upfront planning time I devote, so being able to test and iterate the whole system, as soon as possible, is pretty vital.

It’s also one reason that I like to use test harnesses a lot[0].

[0] https://littlegreenviper.com/testing-harness-vs-unit/

chrisweekly 10 hours ago

Your linked post about test harnesses is outstanding; thanks for sharing!

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siva7 5 hours ago

I've skimmed the article and still have no clue what you guys are talking about. Is test harness another word for end to end testing?

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- ChrisMarshallNY 2 hours ago
  
  Well, I thought I explained it well. Frankly, I'm shocked that folks don't know what test harnesses are. They are one of the oldest constructs in Software Engineering. In the days of old, we often called them "Unit Tests."
  If you want some concrete examples, here you go:
  Here's my "Spinner" widget:
  https://github.com/RiftValleySoftware/RVS_Spinner
  This is the four test harness apps:
  https://github.com/RiftValleySoftware/RVS_Spinner/tree/main/...
  This is my checkbox widget:
  https://github.com/RiftValleySoftware/RVS_Checkbox
  Here's the test harness app:
  https://github.com/RiftValleySoftware/RVS_Checkbox/tree/main...
  There's more, but these should be enough to illustrate the point.
  
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convolvatron 5 hours ago

I agree. the only point that I didn't see there is that test harnesses radically improve reproducibility. no, no change directories, set that environment variable, touch that config file, or do any other manual system state manipulation when running your tests.
put it all in the harness. same run every time, modulo races, and a lot less tripping over magic you can't always remember or show to someone else.

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ChrisMarshallNY 8 hours ago

Thanks!

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