Re: [xml-dev] Testing XML don't use xUnit

[Andrew Welch <andrew.j.welch@gmail.com>]

This is straying away from XML now, but I'll respond anyway...

> Which brings me to the other factor that prompted me to start this
> thread was my exchange with Simon in which I pointed out and he
> acknowledged that Developers are called upon to do all sorts of things
> they are not trained to do.

Most developers I know train themselves.  Devs are kings of any team.
The weakest coders become project managers : )

> It used to be that the developers did their private tests - if you
> were lucky they would write a test plan that may go through a
> review/inspection - often times they would not.

Developers don't write test plans.  That's for the QA team.

> Where a developers testing is private it is fine for nothing to get in
> the way. The problem is that in the Agile/TDD developer centric world
> the developer tests often morph into some sort of regression pack and
> developers do not innately  know how to write those.

Developers 'private testing'? There's nothing private about the tests
you deliver with the code.  Regarding regressions, Agile is all about
avoiding regressions and confident refactoring, all based on the tests
written by the developers.  Read up on continuous build.  The codebase
is continuously tested - there is no 'regression pack' any more, its
all done as part of the build.

Despite the numerous variations in how people 'do agile', that area
has been consistent since the beginning.

> If a developer doesn't have a good sense of what tests to throw
> away and what tests to keep it will show in the regression pack and
> impact the whole project

I don't understand this?  But...

> Like I said some kookoo ideas emerged from developments sudden
> interest in testing. One of them is that it is ok for
> regression/acceptance/integration tests and the like to be written in
> a language that only the developer can understand.

...maybe this is where the confusion is - it sounds like you think the
tests are written by the devs and then handed to the QA team to
maintain?  In which case I could understand your point... but I've
never seen that happen.

This thread is getting way off topic now.  Soon we will be discussing
what agile really means, and no one wants that.


-- 
Andrew Welch
http://andrewjwelch.com