[FR-devel] Unit Tests and documentation

[Rich Kilmer]

Hey all,

As we progress in our developments, I would recommend (someone) look at
a unit testing capability for plugins.  On the current project I am
working on (in the paying world) they have a complex plugin system which
they are scratching their heads trying to figure out how to build a test
harness for.  They use a blackboard-style plugin communications
architecture to abstract plugins from each other...we have a databus.
They have the problem of a complex Java application (400K lines) that we
don't...but...

At that (plugin) level the Databus "interface" that the Plugin exposes
should be tested in a similar sense that the "interface" of a class is
tested via unit tests.  It would be neat to come up with a
TestHarnessPlugin that would load tests (perhaps from other registerd
plugins) and exercise their exposed Databus interfaces using Assert,
etc.

Thoughts?

-Rich

Oh, and BTW...you Plugin developers need to document your code ;-)
FreeBASE is fully RDoc'ed if you want to see the pattern you can use for
your methods.