kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Brian Sidebotham <brian.sidebotham@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Guys,

I'm just catching up with the list, and I saw something that caught my eye
as it's something that's been on my mind for a while:

--------------------------

Dick Hollenbeck wrote:

- Right now, I am finding too many bugs in the software ...

- We might do well as a team by slowing down and focusing
- on reliability and quality not features for awhile.  Firstly,
- the bugs are damaging to the project.

---------------------------

I agree with this, there are things I'd like to add to KiCad, but only
on-top of something I can be confident I'm not breaking, especially by
creating corner case issues.

I would like us to think about regression testing using something like
CTest (Which would make sense as we're currently using CMake anyway!). We
could then publish dashboard regression testing results.

I'm aware work is going into making eeschema and PCBNEW essentially into
DLL's, so perhaps it's best to wait until that work is complete before
starting down this road?

In particular I'd like to see regression testing on the DRC, Gerber
generation, and the Python exposed API. Probably in that order of priority
too. Certainly the Python API changes are already tripping us up, but only
when they have already been broken in committed code.

Being able to regression test changes to optimisations and code tidying
will help that move along anyway as you can be more confident in your
changes having complete coverage once the number of tests increases.

I am prepared to say that I'll undertake this work too. Obviously it can't
start straight away as I'm currently doing work on the Windows scripting
build system and python-a-mingw-us packaging.

Is anyone against regression testing, or have alternatives that would
achieve similar confidence in committed code? My vote is for regression
testing.

We would need good support from all, new code requires new tests, and
nobody is better suited to devising the tests than the person who specified
the new functionality - which means all developers would probably end up
writing test cases at some point.

Best Regards, Brian.