The only thing that I know of that seems to describe what you are looking for is Silktest, but it's expensive and has a proprietary programming language (and, according to rumor, the company may go bankrupt). I'd love to see something like that allows one to easily construct a 'use case' and test against it.
Other than that, the only thing I can think of is to examine your code base, figure out your data sources and see if you can write a code generator for them. It can take quite a bit of work to create a good one, but the effort is worthwhile. I wrote a script to automatically generate form parsing code to deal with a large Web site that had a lot of very poorly done form handling. By creating standard error routines and running the generator against against my Web-based forms, I've been able to do a lot of conversion work quickly and easily. I realize that this is not exactly what you are looking for, as this primarily deals with capturing data and not processing, but it might be a start.
Cheers,
Ovid
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I see what you mean. There is a numerous number of tools out there for other languages but maybe not even a hanfyll for Perl. Maybe this is a sign, write one. Even though this may be a vast task you can make things easier if you get a few people together to make things a bit easier. | [reply] |
Whoo, I think I asked a 2-prong question, which was not necessarily exactly the question I was trying to ask, but in hindsight, is still, I think, a pretty good one ...
We -are- actually using Silk to do our automated testing! I didn't hear the rumor though, thanks for the info! I guess it works fairly well as long as our test engineers can keep up with UI changes.
The thing I'm really thinking about should actually be called a "code validator", I think.
It would make sure all SQL queries in the code were at least somewhat sane, hopefully figure out an automatic way to test individual subs/methods, figure out if/when/where we've got really nasty duplication, and mainly to figure out what breaks if I change this little piece of obscure code over here .... hmm ... *sound of code breaking noisily*
Maybe I should just pray to the Perl Buddha instead!
PS: ovid - that's a nice piece of code there. Code that makes other code is always super super cool in my book! The next time I get to do a ground-up project I am most certainly going to do some kind of component generation if I can! It makes sense and it's so sheik!!
regards,
-mr.dunstan | [reply] |