> Release early, release often

I’m big on this.

I find it efficacious to have an integrated product going as soon as possible, even if it’s a field of stubs.

It’s my experience that I almost never know what the end product will look like, no matter how much upfront planning time I devote, so being able to test and iterate the whole system, as soon as possible, is pretty vital.

It’s also one reason that I like to use test harnesses a lot[0].

[0] https://littlegreenviper.com/testing-harness-vs-unit/

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chrisweekly 5 days ago | parent [-]

Your linked post about test harnesses is outstanding; thanks for sharing!

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siva7 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

I've skimmed the article and still have no clue what you guys are talking about. Is test harness another word for end to end testing?

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glynnormington 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Did you see this helpful link: https://littlegreenviper.com/testing-harness-vs-unit/. According to that usage of "test harness", it's not the same as a unit test. It's a way of driving code manually to explore different usages and to recreate certain kinds of bugs. It is used to complement unit tests.

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ChrisMarshallNY 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Well, I thought I explained it well. Frankly, I'm shocked that folks don't know what test harnesses are. They are one of the oldest constructs in Software Engineering. In the days of old, we often called them "Unit Tests."

If you want some concrete examples, here you go:

Here's my "Spinner" widget:

https://github.com/RiftValleySoftware/RVS_Spinner

This is the four test harness apps:

https://github.com/RiftValleySoftware/RVS_Spinner/tree/main/...

This is my checkbox widget:

https://github.com/RiftValleySoftware/RVS_Checkbox

Here's the test harness app:

https://github.com/RiftValleySoftware/RVS_Checkbox/tree/main...

There's more, but these should be enough to illustrate the point.

	▲	chrisweekly 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Great examples, thanks for sharing links to a real project. But I'm confused by your assertion, > "In the days of old, we often called them "Unit Tests." My understanding is, test harnesses are standalone wrapper apps dedicated to testing, vs more granular unit tests which are traditionally colocated with (eg, files alongside) app src code in a given project. Care to elucidate?

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chrisweekly 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

"Compared to unit tests, a test harness is a [usually] simple standalone application that incorporates the system under test, and presents a user interface. Since it is for testing, it may expose internal metrics and allow the user to access parts of the code that are usually hidden."

^ from https://littlegreenviper.com/testing-harness-vs-unit/

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convolvatron 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I agree. the only point that I didn't see there is that test harnesses radically improve reproducibility. no, no change directories, set that environment variable, touch that config file, or do any other manual system state manipulation when running your tests.

put it all in the harness. same run every time, modulo races, and a lot less tripping over magic you can't always remember or show to someone else.

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ChrisMarshallNY 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Thanks!