From: Jim Weirich <jim@...>
Date: 2004-08-24T03:01:40+09:00
Subject: Re: How to check syntax

> Jamis Buck wrote:
>> Admittedly, if you've never done unit testing before, it is something of
>> a learning curve [...]

Graham Nicholls said:
> Where do I start, then (sigh!).  Is this something I need simply to write
> scripts to do - a la makefiles? - in fact ISTM that a make file would be
> ideal - or am I missing something?

The second volume of the Pragmatic Starter Kit covers unit testing, and it
comes from our very own Dave Thomas / Andy Hunt team!  It covers JUnit,
but the principles carry over to Ruby's Test::Unit fairly directly. 
Highly recommended.

Regarding makefiles ... I use Rake to handle make-like tasks.  I almost
always make the test target the default in Rake, for I run the tests far
more than anything else.  Rake does have some libraries for making run
test suites fairly painless (not that it has to do much, its pretty
painless already).

-- 
-- Jim Weirich     jim@weirichhouse.org    http://onestepback.org
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"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct,
not tried it." -- Donald Knuth (in a memo to Peter van Emde Boas)