I’ve been accepted to work on Django’s Test Suite during the Google Summer of Code this year. I’ll be working to improve the runtime and uniformity of the test suite, mainly by converting existing doc tests to unit tests. This isn’t particularly glamorous, but it should be a chance to get intimately familiar with the Django code base, and it is something that really should be done.
Unit tests will make it quicker to pinpoint exactly what is causing a test to fail. Moving each test case into its own function may reveal bugs that were concealed or glossed over as a side effect of the existing test case environment in the doctest. As I’m working through the code, I’ll be looking out for tests which are doing inefficient things. Developers run the tests regularly, and runtimes can vary from 10 minutes to over an hour depending on hardware and database configuration. By speeding them up, I’ll be saving countless future developer-hours.
Comments
Glad to see you’re doing GSoC this summer. It sounds like you’ll be making a good contribution.
Posted 07 May 2010 at 12:26 PM ¶Glamorous? No. But testing related stuff never is. Well unless you are testing things that explode. Anyway, thanks for the effort.
Posted 15 Jun 2010 at 4:31 AM ¶Post a Comment