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Too Darned Big to Test?
gManZboy writes "In part 2 of its special report on Quality Assurance (part 1) Queue magazine is running an article from Keith Stobie, a test architect in Microsoft's XML Web Services group, about the challenges one faces in trying to test against large codebases."
So this will be Microsoft's latest excuse, then? ;)
"Yo' codebase's so fat, when it get in a lift it has to go down!"
"Yo' codebase is so bloated, it's got its own dialling code!"
"Yo' codebase's so big, NASA includes it in orbital calculations!"
Etc. etc., ad nauseam et infinitum...
Software rewrites may be considered harmful, but at which point do you declare that enough is enough and start again, breaking it down into smaller, easily tested modules? Big, old projects (like, say, OpenOffice.org) can get so appallingly baroque that there must be vital areas of code which haven't been modified (or, more importantly, understood) in years - how do you test those?
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
Yes. It's a wonder why we even have packages like bugzilla anyhow. Nobody tests and reports bugs in opensource software. Ever. Nobody fixes them, either. Ever.
The monkeys are busy writing it. It's like infinite monkeys trying to write shakespeare, except when they finally write code that compiles it has many many unused lines, contibuting to bloat.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
Even if I had fifty pears reviewing my code bugs are going to slip in because they don't fully understand what I am writing.
Well, that's because pears can't code worth a darn. You should be using oranges. I know some people will hold out for bananas, but I've never had good luck with them; they're too fickle. Oranges will get the job done every time.
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!