Role

Responsibilities include:

• Provide overall guidance as to how testing should work
• Identify problems in multiple pieces of contributed code, identify root causes
• Provide root cause input into the overall architecture process to lessen the chances of further occurrences
• Educate users by providing concise documentation (this includes refactoring existing topics on the matter)
• Giving a "stamp of approval" accreditations to contributions deemed to be compliant, blacklisting "for the good of the community" contributions that cause problems
• Factor out common learnings and mechanisms to make them available to all through documentation and commonly callable routines
• (add yours)

Relevant documentation include:

• (lots of good stuff written, we need to link them)

Useful tools might include:

• CPAN:STD::Testgen

(Recent notification of CPAN:STD::Testgen was the impetus for me to write this role spec now.)

-- MartinCleaver - 09 Jun 2003

I think the goal of the test master should be to help define common approaches to testing, and generally improve the automated testing of TWiki (particularly for regression testing) - TWiki does include some automated tests but they aren't consistent across the code base. More radically, Wiki:TestFirstProgramming could be encouraged. Doing all the things identified above would be a lot of work, so the scope of this role may need to be reduced.

I'm not convinced that CPAN:STD::Testgen is a good module to use for this purpose, since it is aimed at Google:STD+2167A, a military standard for software testing that doesn't seem to mesh well with OpenSource project cultures. Have a look at PerlUnitTesting for some information about unit and system testing approaches for Perl.

-- RichardDonkin - 09 Jun 2003