Colony

Felix's Robot Testing Discussion¶

A disucssion/introduction to basic testing.

Minutes¶

• Testing is a state of mind
• Unit test
  • Test should allow you to pinpoint where the problem is
  • If someone changes the implementation, it should come out correctly still
  • You can make these before you write the function (based off the spec)
• Good tests find bugs
  • You probably don't want to toss a bunch of a printf's everywhere
• Regression Testing
  • Write a test that fails reliably with the current code (that has a bug)
  • Collect these, everytime you modfify the code run these tests again
    • If they fail, you broke something that was originally fixed
    • Otherwise you should be good for now
  • Lots of suites to do this, but this may not work for Colony
• Robot Example
  • Tell it to do something (drive forward x inches)
  • Check to see if it did it (did it make it to x inches within acceptable bounds?)
• Think about what you want to test
• The thought was to do a unit test for each code after you wrote it
  • This rarely works (because testing sucks)
  • Write the test and then write the code
  • Write the code and write the test immediately afterwards
  • If you find a bug, add more tests
  • If you change conventions, you might need to fix a test (the test may be wrong)
• What if you don't know the right answer?
  • Gather data first, then have the human choose the best
  • Afterwards you can automate once you know what the right answer is
• Validation testing
  • Use asserts to have sanity checks
    • Throw errors over serial if there is a problems
    • Continue running though, not exit
  • Might add a lot of noise to the code
  • Check inputs, outputs, states (internal/external), data is good
  • Can disable with flags
  • If you have too many you might kill the robot
  • Invalid asserts can be really bad...make sure they are legit
• Document what you're expecting
• Testing doesn't hurt
  • It doesn't need to be super vigorous
  • As long as your confident on the inputs it should be okay
  • Regression and unit tests are useful for later though
• Automated builds may be hard for robots
• You can fix things incrementally, don't go all at once
  • As things break, add regression tests