pcplantdb

[Richard Morris <webmaster@pfaf.org>]

Forwarding message from John to list. I think it might havve been sent 
just to me by mistake

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Testing issues
Date: Mon, 20 Dec 2004 20:35:26 +0000
From: John Schinnerer <john@eco-living.net>
Reply-To: john@eco-living.net
To: Plants For A Future <webmaster@pfaf.org>
References: <16836.47863.930080.827232@elly.galatea.org> 
<41C56DF6.7080604@eco-living.net> 
<Pine.LNX.4.60.0412192313520.30593@cslin-gps.csunix.comp.leeds.ac.uk>

Aloha,

> There seems to be a couple of parts to the results
>
> 1) The actual names of the plants found
>
> 2) How they are displayed i.e. formatting
>
> What could make testing easier is if we can have a plain text output
> just listing the latin names of matching plants. Hopefully that would 
> make doing 1) easier.

Data integrity in our case means in part that the information returned
is both relevant and useful based on the query made.  So we have to have
some means of looking at the whole of the returned information with
respect to the query made.

Canned queries with known results are one piece of testing this, and can
be somewhat automated (script the queries, save results in file, diff
against known correct results file).

User-community testing by people with knowledge enough in certain areas
to catch bugs in info returned vs. query will be another piece, and will
be ongoing once we have a user community.

> Automatic testing for 2 is tricky.

Manual testing will do us OK here...
We create 'canned query' test cases that cover all known/knowable
display formatting issues (e.g. make sure to hit seldom-used fields, all
fields, empties, extremely long strings and so on and on...).
Run the canned queries and visually check the results for correctness.
For our initial "simple" client this will be relatively easy.
For eventual GBI clients and so on it will be less easy, but doable.

Given that live-action multi-player graphical networked games are
testable, and are tested, fancy GBI UIs and the like don't seem so
intimidating... :-)


RICH> Good to hear you can test it.


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