From: ahoward <ahoward@...>
Date: 2003-01-28T03:38:13+09:00
Subject: Re: Test::Unit -> order of tests?

On Tue, 28 Jan 2003, Chad Fowler wrote:

> I humbly disagree with this.  If the order of the tests is guaranteed, it
> would promote temporal coupling between the test cases.  It's better to let
> each "test..." method stand alone without dependencies on the other methods.

this may be true _most_ of the time, but there are cases where it's too
inconvenient to decouple tests from their order, for example, i have a test
suite for a singleton class which manages a bitemporal database stored in
postgresql.  the api performs certain operations and expected the database to
be in a certain state after each one.  the only way to decouple this
particular test from time would be to tear down, and re-import, the database
in the 'setup' method and then perform tests 0 though (n - 1) for each test n.
currently my suite is 2000 lines long and takes 4 minutes to run; if i
followed you approach this suite would balloon to around 10000 lines and take
a _very_ long time to run.  this simply is not pratical in all cases.

-a


>
> Chad
>
> On Tue, 28 Jan 2003, ahoward wrote:
>
> > On Tue, 28 Jan 2003, Michael Garriss wrote:
> >
> > > IMHO, it would be nice if they were run in the order they were defined.
> >
> > agreed.
> >
> > >
> > > -mike
> > >
> > > ahoward wrote:
> > >
> > > >On Tue, 28 Jan 2003, Mauricio Fern�ndez wrote:
> > > >
> > > >
> > > >
> > > >>I'm new to Unit Testing and wanted to learn on it by writing the tests for a
> > > >>cheap file-transfer protocol. There's some hand-shaking involved at the
> > > >>beginning which _needs_ to be done before anything else. The problem is I'd
> > > >>like to test that too, but I don't know if I can rely on any order in the
> > > >>execution of the tests. OTOH, I don't know if it's OK to do everything in
> > > >>#setup and do the assertions right there.
> > > >>
> > > >>
> > > >
> > > >i had a similar problem.  nameing your tests in a manner which sorts lexically
> > > >seems to work, eg :
> > > >
> > > >  def test_a_whatever
> > > >    ...
> > > >  end
> > > >
> > > >  def test_b_whatever
> > > >    ...
> > > >  end
> > > >
> > > >-a
> > > >
> > > >
> > > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> >
> >
>
>
>

-- 

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 | Ara Howard
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