[GNUe-dev] [RFC] PyUnit Framework for GNU Enterprise

[Jan Ischebeck]

Dear Co-Developers,

GNUe still lacks a testing framework. 

After starting up gnue designer 20-30 times for checking if the
appserver dbdriver is working correctly (adding schema introspection), 
I couldn't stand it any longer and thought again that it would be great
to have a good testing environment for the gnue software suite.

Short before releases some more testcases would be useful. Something,
that would have been needed especially after that disastrous 4.x
release. (I think it was a 4.x something, but I'm not sure.)

Now pre-release testing is better, but f.e. in 0.5.1 there are still
some bugs (like some dbdrivers don't return the right record count)
which wouldn't be there if all or many database driver would and could
be tested a) thoroughly and b) in a short amount of time.

I know adding a testing framework needs work too, work that could be
used to further develop other parts of gnue, but I think that it is
necessary that we can test the most important parts of gnue -- that
means gnue-common -- thoroughly. 

On this background I read some introduction about PyUnit and created one
basic test class, which loads records from a database and checks both
record count and the correctness of the data. 

With two other scripts it is possible to startup the tests in text and
in graphics mode. (gcvs run_tests.py, gcvs run_test_gui.py)

The big plus of PyUnit is that its quite easy to use and to extend. So
its quite easy to just add some classes and add new testcases. F.e. it
is IMHO very important to check the type of values returned from the
database. The pypgsql driver f.e. returns some PgInt types, which should
be converted to some standard datatype like Int, Long or a Number type.
This is something difficult to check by just using forms, but easy to
check with a PyUnit test.

I don't think that everyone instantly being converts to a extreme
programming freak, but I would be happy if the next or over-next major
release could be tested thoroughly.

For now I put the code at http://ash.gnuenterprise.org/~jan/unittest/ ,
because I'm not sure weither to put it below gnue-common or to create a
separate cvs repository like gnue-unittests.

Please comment.

Jan

-- 
Jan Ischebeck <address@hidden>