[BBLISA] Article on testing sysadmin scripts

[Dave Allan]

Geez, what an idiot ;)

Seriously, well said, all around.  Your point that writing tests makes you approach writing software differently and leads to better code is really key, and one of those truths like "dealing with time and date is hard" that really has to be experienced to be believed.  Every time I write tests I find that there is much to improve in my code under test, some of it actual behavioral bugs, some of it structural or stylistic, some of it unclear or erroneous assumptions, but I never would have found any of it without taking the time to write the tests.

Dave


On April 8, 2015 1:25:37 PM EDT, Adam Moskowitz <adamm at menlo.com> wrote:
>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/
>
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