Testing

[Loyd Goodbar <loyd@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I'm in the middle of reading _The Pragmatic Programmer_ (Andrew Hunt and David
Thomas; Addison-Wesley 2000) and came across the testing section of the book
("Code That's Easy to Test").

The argument is, module/unit testing should be a built-in, selectable/runnable
part of the application. This is true in the Perl world; the make process
typically runs a make test to ensure Perl modules do what they think they're
supposed to do.

My question is, what kind of testing is built into our applications? I've been
working on an in-house tools service program, and I have a rudimentary test
script (call a subprocedure, compare its results to those expected) outside of
the service program. After reading the relevant section in Pragmatic
Programmer, I'm going to try creating a test subprocedure that exercises the
entire service program.

In the RPG/CL world, what are you doing to make a test suite for your
programs? Is there a daily build? The traditional approach is to have a "test
environment", but does it truly duplicate the production environment? Does the
test environment have invalid data (I think it should), or is it just a mirror
of the production environment? When programs blow up in production, how do we
test the programs without endangering live data (assuming blowing up didn't
cause it in the first place)?

I'm not trying to flame, but am interested in the testing procedures in use
for traditional RPG/ILE/CL programming.

Loyd
--
"Why, you can even hear yourself think." --Hobbes
"This is making me nervous. Let's go in." --Calvin
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