A test guy

Late last night, I skimmed through the first 7 chapters of Michael Feathers‘ book Working Effectively with Legacy Code, and came up with the following quick action items:

• find someone with whom to pair to add some tests and break some dependencies
• look up C++, Javascript, and possibly even XUL refactoring tools (I can dream…)
• check out www.mockobjects.com
• check out cppUnitLite
• research XPCOM registration – how much would need to be mocked?
• research mozilla makefiles – where can I run “make test” to run unit tests using object dirs
• ask sr and drivers if any of them are interested in unit tests/TDD

I’ve come to accept these late-night inspirational yet confusing thoughts.

Earlier this evening, I learned that Danny Faught is putting together a toolsmiths guild/group/something (details to be shared in the future). I read over the archived discussions, and realised that I want to be a toolsmith for the mozilla community.

But the community is huge, so I should find other toolsmiths. Or attract them. Or grow them.

But I also need to find programmers and testers who are in need of toolsmith services.

I should be an example of what I think a toolsmith should be. But time spent being a toolsmith is time not spent growing a toolsmith community. And I think I’m better at growing the community than being an exceptional toolsmith. But I still need a body of work (running code) to point to when I talk with others about these ideas.

Balance. Bias towards running code. Vertical slices of functionality. Start with something doable, then improve incrementally and by factoring and refactoring.

But ARRRRRGGGGGGGHHHHHHH! I need to pick something and get coding. Something besides security testing, because I will need to share the results with as wide a community as possible.

Maybe Calendar or XForms, since developers from those areas have said they’d like to work with me on tests. Or Places, since they have a test script that looks like it would be easy to convert to a standard harness. Or something else that will enter my awareness.

Sigh. I’m done whining now.

I’ve created a Software Testing project coordination page just to get things started.

One part of writing is writing things down, and the page is not much more than that. One step at a time.