When is unit-testing bad? [was: Re: does lack of type...]

Jeremy Bowers jerf at jerf.org
Wed Jul 2 21:14:44 EDT 2003


On Wed, 02 Jul 2003 15:21:45 +0200, Aurélien Géron wrote:
> I'd be interested to know about
> projects where they automate unit tests for GUIs, but I suspect it would be
> just as cumbersome.

I'm doing one right now. It's designed from the ground up by me, so it's
testable. It almost has to be, since it's fairly complicated and Needs To
Work.

For the record, I've found Tkinter does *great* with this, because you can
drive the GUI without ever actually starting the event loop. It doesn't
seem perfect but largely works, much better then it has any right to.

wxPython doesn't work at all without an event loop, so I never did get it
tested, which has contributed to me dropping it. ;-) (I'm gonna guess that
never entered into anybody's head when they were designing toolkits...)

> In all those cases, I much prefer having a human being go out and do the
> unit tests manually.

The thing is, they won't. We've got about 50 years of collective
experience backing that up.




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