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by James Robertson.
Original Post: The SUnit Irony and Dilemma
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In SUnit, there is a great irony. When I first started eXtreme Programming, this was one of the first facets that I was exposed. And in a very cool meta reflective way, SUnit itself was an example XP practices at work, having kept it simple. No frameworks there!
My experience with XP driven evolutions of object systems, is that often I come to a point, where enough of the original context has changed, it's time to back up a little, and see if its not time to refactor mercilessly. But this has never really happened to SUnit. Maybe the design as is still stands. And the the fact that the code is orders of magnitude larger than the original means nothing. But if that's not the case. Then what a great irony. That this penultimate example of testing and how code should grow evolve, hasn't.
Sitting here staring at the thing... I'm not sure what to think. I have a number of changes that come to mind. One of the biggest hurdles that stands in the way, is the xflavor stuff. Using CompiledMethods as test place holders, that would be, well, dialect specific. I'd like to wire triggerEvent:'s in, but that's dialect specific too. And there's this big layer of sunitMethods that get in the way.
Another, is that there's no tight community with an agreed vision of desires. For example, I don't think TestSuite's tests should be an OrderedCollection. I think it should be a Set. And I think run: should always run: them randomly. But if someone out there is depending on being able to run suites in the order they composed them, I have no idea. Even more interesting, if someone wants to stress test units by loading multiples of the same test in a suite, I don't know.
I toyed with doing a clean room VW specific implementation of SUnit, but when I got looking at the integrated tool momentum behind the current version (some of which I've written), I balked.
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