kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Kaspar Emanuel <kaspar.emanuel@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Miguel,


> Asking google about you (to find your hardware) I discovered that you were
> playing with kicad/unittests this summer.
>

The hardware was this, if you are still curious: http://www.alphasphere.com/

The hardware itself hasn't been published but the firmware and
software is GPL (https://github.com/nu-desine). I have since left the
company but I still hope to one day make a repair manual for it which
will include the layout and schematics.

> Wouls you like it incorporated to qa/testcases?

Yes please! It was only a quick play but if it looks useful, go for it.

>
> If you had more time, I believe kicad could benefit from more unit tests,
>

I will definitely try and make some time for it. I can't recall
exactly now but I think I was unhappy with the way the classes were
organized. I can't remember if this was in C++ or just in the bindings
though. I will have a look over this and bring it up for discussion.

> When you have good unit testing, you're able to refactor your code with more
> confidence
> and keep a higher code quality because tests will warn you if you're
> breaking something.

Totally.

> But we're yet far from being able to rely on the tests :-)

Well 100% coverage of KiCad is going to be impossible but if nip it in
the bud we should be able to get decent coverage of the Python
bindings at least (and maybe switch to developing them using TDD?)

Ciao,

Kaspar