On Sep 11, 2008, at 5:41 PM, Caleb Clausen wrote:

> On 9/10/08, Surya <surya5kn / gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi Friends,
>>
>> I have been in to testing for 3 yrs. In my project there are 6000  
>> test
>> cases present and some of them ought to be non-value adding to the
>> testing effort. Around 80% of the total test cases were automated and
>> would like to run execersie to reduce the un important test cases  
>> from
>> the pool. Can any one suggest how to go about this and apply
>> Combinatorial/pairwise testing effectively to my situation.
>
> I suffer from an excess of test cases as well, but I don't have a
> ready solution.
> I have heard before of tools to help identify redundant test cases,
> but none for
> use with ruby.
>
> I imagine such a tool would work like this:
> 1) run each test case by itself within a coverage analyzer, to get a
> list of lines executed.
> 2) now work thru the list of lists of lines covered per test case,
> eliminating test cases where each line covered by that case is covered
> also in some other case. (A number of algorithms are possible here.)
>
> Writing a tool like that wouldn't be too hard. Getting it to be
> efficient might be challenging...
>
> Of course there's a problem with this; line coverage is less than
> perfect.  So if there's a
> line whose first half is tested by one test case, and the second half
> tested by another
> test case, the second case may be flagged as redundant when it isn't.
> Expression
> coverage is the gold standard when it comes to code coverage. So
> ideally, you'd write the
> tool above to work expression by expression rather than line by line.
> There are no expression-based coverage tools for ruby that I know of.
>
> Even expression coverage will only give you complete code coverage;
> data coverage is
> another matter. Is there a tool or metric for assessing data coverage?
> I have no idea.
>

path to insanity if you ask me:


   cover_this = Array.new(10000){|i|  define_method("foo_#{ i }"){ i } }



a @ http://codeforpeople.com/
--
we can deny everything, except that we have the possibility of being  
better. simply reflect on that.
h.h. the 14th dalai lama