[XSL-LIST Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date]

Re: [xsl] XSLT Unit Testing and Coverage

---

---

On 5/30/2014 8:00 AM, Andrew Welch andrew.j.welch@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

I wouldn't call these unit tests, though; they are more akin to
so-called "integration" tests.

I wouldn't get too hung up about the distinction: if your entire
product is your xslt you might think of them as integration tests but
if your xslt is just a small part of some bigger application you might
consider them unit tests...

Yes, the distinction wasn't clear. I just meant we don't tend to write tests for each template or function. Instead we test the transformation as a whole.

Measuring test coverage we have also found useful, but less so.  My team
invested some effort in getting Cakupan working but ran into some roadblocks
and ended up implementing our own (Saxon-specific) solution.  We had a
certain amount of discussion about whether line-oriented coverage metrics
made sense for XSLT but ended up implementing that since it was easiest.
One time coverage tools are very useful is when unlimbering old code that
may not be well maintained: a coverage measurement can give an idea of how
complete the test suite is, and may point areas of dead code.

I'm not convinced by test coverage yet - a lot of processing will
(typically) go through the identity template, and a single test
covering that will give misleading stats.  Any comments on that?

I'm not really interested in stats (how many times a given code block was exercised) - is that what you meant? I just care whether there is at least one test covering each template.

-Mike

---