Testing reports

[John Ralls]

On Apr 12, 2012, at 7:06 AM, John Layman wrote:

>> Tests which fail for insignificant reasons (like case in an SGML tag)
> waste
>> developer time and are worse than useless.
> 
> One could argue that it's a bigger waste of developer time to complicate
> test creation in the interest of discriminating that which is significant
> from that which is not in every imaginable potential scenario.  By
> implication, you appear to be saying that the trivial work of updating a
> test oracle is a poor use of the programming artiste's time.  Artists do
> clean their own brushes, you know.  Doing so may be trivial, but it's part
> of the process.

One could argue that, but one would be wrong. Chasing down a single test failure, particularly in system tests (as opposed to unit tests), takes far more time than writing a good test in the first place. That's especially true if someone else has already written a comparison function that discriminates correctly between changes that matter and those that don't, which is the case for HTML parsing.

Regards,
John Ralls