Re: RFC : SOME IDEAS FOR THE APPLE II FPGA'ers

["Michael J. Mahon" <mjmahon@aol.com>]

sicklittlemonkey wrote:
> > ... radical approaches such as "extreme programming" also touch on it.
>
>
> Test driven development is actually widely accepted in industry now,
> especially in the java world and open source projects.

It's good to know that it's catching on.

But I proposed not only functionality testing (the easy part), but
concurrency "race" testing (which is what relibility load testing
actually does, but with poor statistics).

As we increasingly shift to a multithreaded, multiprocessing world,
the combintoric explosion of timing conditions must be addressed
directlt, instead of just exercising a system a lot and hoping that
any faults will occur (nondetermistically) during stress testing.

A deterministic timing test can be both exhaustive and repeatable,
so the bug can actually be found quickly, and it's fix verified.

> It's a step beyond Michael's anecdote - to actually code the tests
> before the functionality itself. Still, I wonder how long ago this was.
> Was, and is, Michael a man before his time? (Ironic for a //e addict.
> ;-)

Actually, I proposed coding the tests in parallel with coding the
function.  Time-to-market...

..and I've *always* been before my time--a blessed curse.  ;-)

-michael

Music synthesis for 8-bit Apple II's!
Home page:  http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/

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