kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Miguel Angel Ajo <miguelangel@xxxxxxx>]

I agree that some kind of automated QA tests for the project would be great, Adam wolf and I 
had a conversation about that recently.

I've seen many projects dramatically increasing quality because of regression testing. I'm not
sure how well is wx prepared for the UI parts, but we can do it for sure at objects level. 

Even, to reduce the test development time, we could even think of writing the tests in python
directly, at least at pcbnew  I think it can be done.


Miguel Angel Ajo
http://www.nbee.es (http://www.nbee.es/)
+34911407752
skype: ajoajoajo


On Sunday, 28 de April de 2013 at 17:54, Brian Sidebotham wrote:

> 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.
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~kicad-developers
> Post to : kicad-developers@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (mailto:kicad-developers@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx)
> Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~kicad-developers
> More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
> 
>