How I Use Autotest

drbrain@segment7.net (Eric Hodel) — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 14:33:23 -0800

During the Q&A portion of my talk, I was asked a very important question about autotest, something like “How often do you save when using autotest?” I save all the time when using autotest. There was a followup question, something like “Don’t you get syntax errors?” and I don’t.

Before I wrote autotest I was making fine-grained saves that were syntactically correct. I wrote autotest to automate the running of tests so I wouldn’t have to choose which tests to run. My changes were so small that I spent an annoying fraction of my time editing my command line.

When I’m using autotest, rather than writing all of a method’s tests, I start by performing the setup (which should cause an error), add a flunk, and save, which is usually four lines:

  def test_blah
    result = @thingy.blah
    flunk
  end

When the tests run they’ll see the method blah doesn’t exist and fail, so I define the method, (the def blah and end lines), and save. Then I write an assertion and save the test, which will fail, so I implement what I need to make the assertion pass, and save. Now I repeatedly perform the minimum changes to go from failure to flunking until my test is complete, remove the flunk, and start over with the next method.

Each save I do is a handful of lines, so it’s easy to keep them syntactically correct. I know I’m going from working state to working state as I work towards my end goal so I can easily roll back my changes with undo.

"How I Use Autotest" by Bryan

Sun, 09 Dec 2007 22:04:06 -0800

I love autotest.. it’s essentially made testing enjoyable for me now. Having the autotest window constantly updating (I save often…) has made me nearly obsessed with making sure it’s green. Thanks for awesome tool.

Segment7: How I Use Autotest

How I Use Autotest

"How I Use Autotest" by Bryan