Software Carpentry QMTest Testing Tool Released

soundsop writes: "The first tool resulting from the winners of a design competition by the Software Carpentry project has been released. The QMTest tool is a testing tool to replace software such as XUnit, Expect and DejaGnu. An issue tracking tool, called QMTrack (a la Bugzilla) is forthcoming. It looks like the winning design proposals for a config tool (autoconf replacement) and a build tool (make replacement) are not being implemented."

Comments

I hope the software is better

[pong]

As an XP developer I take a serious interest in unit testing, so I browsed the site - claims claims claims, but no details... I perused their PDF white paper - more claims and absolutely no specifics.

If they can't explain exactly what you get with QMTest in a few paragraphs, then it is probably not worth my time. Thankfully I'm already quite pleased with JUnit, RubyUnit and CppUnit.

However, if other slashdot readers have more patience with the project - I encourage them to write a summary of their findings here!

dejagnu

[CatherineCornelius]

First, I like writing test cases in a text editor, programmatically. It's tedious enough writing them in the first place, at least I can cut-and-paste and modify them quickly in an editor. Going through a web GUI does not seem like it's very efficient.

This was also one of my concerns. Though I haven't yet successfully downloaded the source from this rather slow site, I do note that it also supports a command line interface.

I'm currently wrestling with dejagnu. Although the documentation of this tool seems to assume a familiarity with autoconf that I do not yet have, it is simple enough to use once you have set up the project test suite. I'd say it's probably pretty hard to beat. Expect is a pretty good tool upon which to base a test suite.

big design up front

[sohp]

So they've gathered a lot of requirements and done a lot design, but, as the lady says, "Where's the beef?" Why do all this work to replace open source tools that already exist? Why not take those tools and contribute back to them, or if the project owners don't like the contributions, take the things they like and build from there?

Perhaps this from their web page: "The Advanced Computing Laboratory at Los Alamos National Laboratory is providing $860,000 of funding for Software Carpentry, which is being administered by Code Sourcery, LLC." And this: CodeSourcery also provides training and strategic consulting services for companies considering the adoption of free or open source software.

Why use the MIT License? Why develop in Python? Why require that the submissions to the design competition not contain any source code? They require a language but not any source? Am I being too cynical in seeing how, after all this contributed design, coding, testing, etc is done, at taxpayer expense, Code Sourcery is now in a tremendous position as the sole-source solution for support and training to the shops that choose to use these tools? And to notice that choosing the MIT license allows them to take and wrap up all the source code into their products and not give back anything? These are questions that either are in the FAQ but not clearly answered, or not spoken about. Even the SC site itself has been retired and archived.

Thanks, I'll stick with XUnit, Bugzilla, cvs (and subversion when it's ready. For build config tools, well, if you do cross-platform C and C++, then autoconf or its successor, but that's just for one language and set of development requirements.

I'll be interested to see if anything widely used comes out of this exercise. So far, of the all the tools implementations promised for "Summer of 2001", we have QMTest 1.0. The rest? Late and unfinished.