[BBLISA] Article on testing sysadmin scripts

[Adam Moskowitz]

Warning: shameless self-promotion follows . . .

For those of you who aren't members of USENIX, the April issue [1] of
";login:" [2], USENIX's magazine/journal, has an article [3] on
"Software Testing for Sysadmin Programs." It's written by some guy who
may or may not know what he's talking about but it addresses the issue
of how to bring more software engineering discipline to system
administration. Regardless of the author's credentials, he's made the
article and associated examples [4] available for free. The article
isn't very long (four pages) and the examples are fairly easy to
understand. If you've ever had a program that worked but then broke when
you tried to update it or add what seemed like a small feature, take a
few moments to read the article and you may find that adding testing to
your software development isn't as hard as you once thought.

If you find the article useful (or even just interesting), or if any of
the other articles look like they might be interesting but you can't
read them because you're not a USENIX member, you might consider joining
USENIX because of articles like this one plus the ones every month by
people like David Blank-Edelman and Andrew Seely.

Adam


[1] https://www.usenix.org/publications/login/apr15

[2] https://www.usenix.org/publications/login

[3] http://menlo.com/tdd4sa/login_apr15_06_moskowitz.pdf

[4] http://menlo.com/tdd4sa/