Re: Testing and Test Driver

On Thu, Jul 19, 2012 at 12:17 AM, Marcus Geelnard <mage@opera.com> wrote:

> Den 2012-07-19 01:00:18 skrev Doug Schepers <schepers@w3.org>:
>
>  Hi, folks-
>>
>>  [snip ;) ]
>
>>
>> Thoughts?
>>
>
> Generally, I'm positive to early testing and DFT (design for test)
> methodology. However, the current state of the Web Audio API poses a few
> issues:
>
> * Much of the signal processing behavior of the audio API is undefined,
> meaning that the majority of semantic tests are currently impossible to
> write based on the spec. Here, writing the tests and writing the spec would
> go hand-in-hand, and can probably only be done successfully by the editor.
>

Having written some tests, I don't think it needs to be that tightly
coupled to the editor.  Granted, this will cause some delay in updating the
spec, but for the areas that are incomplete, I doubt this adds any
additional time because we all need to come to an agreement on what details
need to be resolved.


>
> * Generally speaking, writing tests would more often than not require
> changes/additions to the spec (e.g. turning non-normative wording into
> normative text), and I don't really see how we can do that efficiently
> unless the test writers are also spec writers in one way or the other.
>

Sometime back, I added a small enhancement for biquad nodes.  After writing
the test for that, I just wrote a patch with appropriate text for the
enhancement, and some additional text describing the 7 biquad types and
gave it to Chris Rogers.  He incorporated the changes fairly quickly.

I guess what I'm saying is that we will probably spend a lot more time
deciding on what the tests should actually be testing and whether they're
valid or not than we will on updating the spec to say what we mean.

Ray