[Kc] Testing

[Andrew Moore]

On Fri, Sep 14, 2007 at 12:59:22PM -0500, djgoku wrote:
> So I read through both Test::Tutorial and Test::Simple and I am
> wondering how can I test my data that I get from excel spreadsheets:
> http://mail.pm.org/pipermail/kc/2006-September/000588.html
> 
> I have a couple thousand sheets that will be parsed, but not all the
> sheets are at a current easily parsed format. So how can I find the
> bad sheets and how should I start testing to make sure the data I want
> is what I am really getting.
> 
> Currently the this is more a script than a module I don't know yet how
> to create a module, but plan to convert this sometime.

If I were building something like that I would certainly use automated
testing to help ensure that my parser would read everything I wanted
out of some example spreadsheets. I'd take a few of the spreadsheets,
or some that I worked up on my own and use them for input. Then, I'd
make my test suite call the parsing code on each spredsheet and
validate the results. If they all worked, then I'd be more confident
that the parser was working correctly and would try it on the entire
body of spreadsheets.

Of course, I'd also put some diagnostics and logging into the code so
that I could tell if there were unexpected problems while parsing
either the examples or the actual data.

I would certainly find it much easier to do this all if my parsing
code were written as a module so that I could call different methods
from the test suite and check the results.

If you'd like, feel free to send me what you have off-list. I'll help
you a bit with it, and it may become something that you can discuss at
next month's meeting.

-A