[Tutor] OT: (Continuous) integration testing: Can a solo developer with very limited resources truly do this?

[Alan Gauld]

On 12/03/16 18:10, boB Stepp wrote:

> <quote>
> You're already writing unit tests to exercise your code.  Whenever you
> modify or refactor your code, you exercise your test cases before you
> check in the code.  All you have to do now is exercise your test cases
> on each supported platform or environment.

That's not what I'd call integration testing. Integration testing
tests the interfaces between your classes/modules/processes.
And that's a completely different set of tests from your unit
tests.

That nit-pick aside...

> If your application is expected to run on different operating systems
> (MacOS, Linux, Windows, etc.), *** you need to test on all of them ***

> I firmly agree that this -- in principle -- must be done.  But how on
> earth can a solo developer, perhaps hoping to make a buck or two, with
> very limited resources, accomplish manual (much less continuous,
> automated) integration testing on all reasonable environment
> possibilities?  

Virtual machines, eg VirtualBox.
You can install all of the required OS on a single physical machine
(assuming the same hardware of course). For example, on my
Linux Mint box I have 2 versions of Windows(XP and Win 8.1)
plus Ubuntu and Mandriva Linux virtual machines ready to run.
It only takes a few seconds to start/stop each one.

It might be possible to run an intel based MacOS in a virtual
machine too but I've not tried that and limit my Apple testing
to my ancient G3 based iBook...

> the same.  In this instance, they went backwards with Python and
> installed Python 2.4 on the new server.  Since which server gets used
> is out of the user's control, sometimes my tests ran on one server,
> sometimes on the other.  

Eeek, that's bad. Mirrored servers should be mirrors.
Somebody deserves a serious kicking!

-- 
Alan G
Author of the Learn to Program web site
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