Testing

gnat on 2002-09-20T16:50:51

I'm really impressed with Ovid's testing experiences. I think there's an interesting psychological phenomenon related to testing and exercise and all those Good Things. When I do them, I know they're good. But they just aren't what I find fun, so I don't do them as often as I should. There's a difference between the "feels good when I stop" and the "feels good when I do" that means I get addicted to coding but not to exercise or testing or vegetables.

--Nat

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testng, testing

pemungkah on 2002-09-20T16:56:46

Ditto on originally not wanting to write tests. The day job still is a situation difficult to unit test, mostly because the code's grown over the past 5 years to such an extent as to be almost unrecognizable.

However, outside of this, I use Test::Simple lots and am very, very happy with it. It turns the process into just another simple-to-do operation. And it caught a bug in GraphViz::Data:Structure that I still don't know how to fix yet, but at least I know it exists!

Testing paradox

Ovid on 2002-09-20T18:37:14

I have this weird problem that I am addicted to experiencing new things (whether programming related or otherwise), but at the same time I am resistant to change. I was always curious about testing, but I didn't want to change my routine at work, even though I knew it was necessary. Now that I've gotten over the hump, I'm addicted.

Testing seems like grunt work to many programmers, but what has really sold me is the problem I used to have: whenever I would make large-scale changes to a system, I would have this irritable feeling in the pit of my stomach that kept letting me know that I must have missed something. Now that I write the tests first, I know for a fact that I've missed something, but that's because my test has caught it and not an angry call from a customer at two in the morning. Testing just makes me feel like more of a man :)