[Systers-dev] GSOC Systers wishlist project

[Erica Wolfe]

Hi Anne,

Thanks so much for the post.  I, too, am interested in the wishlist items
and bug fix project.

On Mon, Apr 5, 2010 at 9:36 AM, Anne Gunn <ompeag at wyoming.com> wrote:

> Programming has always been about
>   communication, after all, and now with usability becoming such a big
>   issue/barrier to progress, our discipline can use all the knowledge of
>   human factors we can get.
>

Your words of encouragement are heartening.  I always hope my BA in
Sociology from University of Michigan will be handy.  :)

  One thing I would hope/encourage us to develop during this project is
>   some level of unit testing.  Python offers a couple of different
>   approaches to unit testing, depending on how formal and automated you
>   want to get.  Although unit testing is generally talked about in terms
>   of greenfield (new code) development, I've had very good luck applying
>   it to existing bodies of code.  The interesting thing about fixing bugs
>   and/or adding features to relatively large bodies of code is that the
>   change itself is often relatively straightforward but the unintended
>   side effects can be remarkable and varied.  Unit/regression testing
>   allows you to begin to get some telemetry on whether or not you broke
>   something else while you fixed the thing you intended.  It's an
>   imperfect art and when you start doing it with a legacy code base, you
>   are certain to never have enough tests, but 'Don't let the fear that
>   testing can't catch all bugs stop you from writing the tests that will
>   catch most bugs.'  -- Martin Fowler.
>

As I'm new to programming, and testing has not been covered at all in my
coursework, I'm interested in how, or whether, you see this working with the
GSOC project on patches, release and testing automation.

Regards,
Erica