From: sera@... (Francis Hwang) Date: 2003-05-16T10:37:45+09:00 Subject: Re: Test::Unit sequencing ahoward wrote in message news:... > no. it's the interaction between the database and my api which is being > tested! it is slow and *very* complex, much more so because of the > bi-temporal aspect, but this slow complex behavior *is* what i'm testing. > > at the time - i couldn't see any alternatives (of course there probably are). Well, it sounds like the solution you came upon -- having long tests that have lots of little indirect asserts, called in a specific order -- works, more or less. Unit tests ideally shouldn't be really long -- they're less useful as documentation that way -- but then sometimes you can't help it. I find that when I'm testing high-level objects I tend to write pretty long, involved unit-tests. When I'm testing low-level stuff I like my tests to be just a few lines. I've never written any code that's so low-level, and thus would require so much setup & teardown time, but I suppose if I were eventually I'd look into having a separate machine for continuous integration. ThoughtWorks' Cruise Control, for example, continually pings the CVS server, waiting for checkin to calm down, and then checks it out and runs full tests. One of its goals, specifically, is to make it easier to have tests running even if the whole suite takes 15 minutes to run. Of course, maybe you don't need that yet. Just something to think about in the future. Francis