Re: Art of Unit Testing

phil hunt wrote:
I think we might be talking at cross purposes here. To me "acceptance test suite" means a test suite that has to be passed each time before a new version of the software is released to the users. I don't see that 10 minutes is a sensible limit here, unless you are releasing more often that once a day. (I once had an acceptance test suite that ran for 12 hours; I used to run it nightly).

We're clearly on different wavelengths. I thought Extreme Programming was sort of the context, where the acceptance tests actually *are* run many times during the day, as well as before each new release. (A new release could technically occur more than once in a day as well, so it's a good thing if the tests take less than 12 hours.)

Still, in a large project (and especially one written in Python, with the overhead of interpreter startup and the cost of executing bytecode) the suite can get fairly long if you have many hundreds of tests. 

I'm currently running one with 227 assertions in 38 test functions.
It runs in <1 second on an AMD 3000+.


That's a nice start. ;-)

-Peter
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