Seattle.rb: February 2007 Archives

Heckle is a mutation tester. It modifies your code and runs your tests to make sure they fail. The idea is that if code can be changed and your tests don't notice, either that code isn't being covered or it doesn't do anything.

Changes:

• 1 major enhancement:
  • Unified diffs for mutatated methods
• 4 minor enhancements:
  • Now returns exit status 1 if failed.
  • Added a simple report at the end.
  • Runs are now sorted by method.
  • Autodetects rails and changes test_pattern accordingly.
• 2 bug fixes:
  • Aborts when an unknown method is supplied.
  • Escapes slashes in random regexps.

ruby2ruby provides a means of generating pure ruby code easily from ParseTree's Sexps. This makes making dynamic language processors much easier in ruby than ever before.

Changes:

== 1.1.5 / 2007-02-13

• 3 minor enhancements:
  • Can now heckle ActiveRecord::Base in full.
  • Cleaned up 1-liner generating code.
  • Made clean/simple rescues 1-liners.
• 7 bug fixes:
  • Finally got the rest of blockpass working.
  • Fixed blockpass on procs in iters. UGH!
  • Fixed attrasgn in masgn.
  • Fixed splat in masgn.
  • Fixed unary/prefix methods.
  • Fixed attrasgn for []= where there were multiple args inside [].
  • Fixed a couple resbody bugs.

Hoe is a simple rake/rubygems helper for project Rakefiles. It generates all the usual tasks for projects including rdoc generation, testing, packaging, and deployment.

Tasks Provided:

• announce - Generate email announcement file and post to rubyforge.
• audit - Run ZenTest against the package
• check_manifest - Verify the manifest
• clean - Clean up all the extras
• config_hoe - Create a fresh ~/.hoerc file
• debug_gem - Show information about the gem.
• default - Run the default tasks
• docs - Build the docs HTML Files
• email - Generate email announcement file.
• install - Install the package. Uses PREFIX and RUBYLIB
• install_gem - Install the package as a gem
• multi - Run the test suite using multiruby
• package - Build all the packages
• post_blog - Post announcement to blog.
• post_news - Post announcement to rubyforge.
• publish_docs - Publish RDoc to RubyForge
• release - Package and upload the release to rubyforge.
• ridocs - Generate ri locally for testing
• test - Run the test suite. Use FILTER to add to the command line.
• test_deps - Show which test files fail when run alone.
• uninstall - Uninstall the package.

See class rdoc for help. Hint: ri Hoe

Changes:

= 1.2.0 2007-02-13

• Added more support for ext dirs.
• Added a simple config file (yaml). Use 'rake config_hoe' to edit.
• Added postblog task (thanks Aaron!), configured via confighoe.
• Announce task now posts to your blogs and/or publishes API depending on config.

From an IM with Eric Hodel:

"I ran it on [insert scary class name here]
it finally ran into a [method in the r's] about 2 hours later
I think it found no errors
so heckle will tell you one of three things about your code:
its well tested,
its poorly tested,
and its so coupled that test failures must happen because its crap." (emphasis mine)

I have to agree. When I started heckle I was hoping for somehing better than rcov that would tell you that your code is poorly tested... But code so poorly engineered that changing anything as bound to make everything fall apart looks like well tested (read: heckle-proof) code in a sense. We both think that running just the unit tests that directly test the MUT (method under test) would help, but really it wouldn't help enough. I tend to think at that point that you don't have technology problems, you've got people problems. Technology can't help that very well.

Suggestions? How would you differentiate between "well tested" and "tightly coupled crap"?