Good things have happened in the test world in the past couple of weeks.
Andy has checked in a couple of patches for Test::Harness::Straps to collect diagnostic information. This means that writing a custom harness to print out (and colorize) only failed tests is easy.
Last week, Autrijus and I discussed porting Test::Builder to Perl 6 for Pugs. Schwern and I sketched out some refactorings of Test::Builder a couple of years ago and promptly didn't do it. I resurrected the idea (if not the notes, if that hard drive even exists anywhere accessible anymore) and came up with some ideas last night. Today, the idea came up again on the Perl QA mailing list for Perl 5 and it looks like we can go ahead with it.
Most of the ideas are merely internal cleanups, but they'll make it possible to do some cooler things that people have asked for in cleaner ways.
I've spent some of my off-hours documenting existing and inventing some new testing tricks. I'll explain more about this soon.
Finally, I'm fiddling with the OpenGL bindings to Parrot again. What? You didn't know they existed? Oh, they do. I'll show them off soon.
Being busy, I haven't had much time to do more than skim what's on the QA list, but I've been quite happy with what I've seen. One thing this would make trivial is a little Tk GUI that could mimic a JUnit GUI interface. I've always been amazed at how much pretty colors can influence people.
Of course, a well-designed GUI interface could do more than just be flashy. It could actually make testing information easier to organize and present. That could be a fun little project.
