test infrastructure ideas appreciated ...

[Kohei Yoshida]

On Wed, 2015-06-03 at 14:33 +0100, Michael Meeks wrote:

> Having said that writing unit tests is every
> developers' responsibility where feasible

So, this "where feasible" is quite often subject to a wide range of
interpretation.  For some, writing a unit test is often not "feasible"
if a bug fix happens during a busy release cycle because "there is no
time to write a test" even when a fix was technically fully
unit-testable (which BTW I fully disagree).

I hope that we can also strive to change the culture amongst developers
in this project and make a unit test a quasi-requirement for every bug
fix (unless there is a technical reason why a test cannot be written).
Adding new testing infrastructure is fine and all esp for areas that are
currently not easily testable. But I believe what's equally important is
to raise awareness on the importance of writing tests and make it as
important as (if not more important) fixing the bug itself, and promote
that mindset.

If there is any way track bug fixes without corresponding unit tests and
make that data available in some way, then that to me would be a very
helpful tool to ensure that every bug fix comes with a test to prevent
it from happening again.

Kohei