[TIP] running nosetests automatically in the background?

[Michał Kwiatkowski]

On 3/22/07, Kumar McMillan <kumar.mcmillan at gmail.com> wrote:
> Have you [or has anyone] used nosy much?  I also got interested in
> this idea of constantly running tests when someone told me about
> zentest/autotest for ruby
> (http://www.zenspider.com/ZSS/Products/ZenTest/).

I haven't used nosy, but I tried autotest. For a day. Yeah, it was
enough to annoy me. ;) After testing it myself I admit I don't really
like the idea of running certain tests automatically on every file
save. For starters: test choice heuristics aren't perfect and never
will be - an application would not only have to understand the code
and tests but read my mind as well - who knows what intention I have
in changing certain lines of code? This bug hit me few times by not
running all relevant tests (so I have bugs which I don't know of) or
running all of them (when changing a comment in test helper for
example). Generally I believe the programmer should know best what
pieces of behaviour he is implementing, what implies which tests
should he run. And after implementing given piece of behaviour *all*
tests have to be run nevertheless, because one of a characteristics of
a good test suite is discovering _unpredictable_ behaviour changes.
You can't escape running all your tests at the end.

Cheers,
mk