MassTest and Giving Back

First of all, I’m pretty pleased right now with my MassTest extension to the Test::Unit library for Ruby. I really need to add it as a gem, or something, because I think it would probably be useful for purposes beyond testing web sites – my original use case.

As an aside, while coding for Test::Unit, I’m not entirely sure that it’s approach is necessarily the best one. Because of it’s TestCase-is-class philosophy – and by dropping the JUnit TestSuite-is-a-TestCase paradigm – it’s a bit on the tetchy side to extend. I want to incorporate it, and if it’s similarly annoying, I may be compelled to produce a competing package.

There are a couple of features I’d like to add to MassTest, and I don’t want to forget them. Quicky listy:

• Include directory – This is kind of a general thing I want to do in Ruby in general. I want to scan a directory, load and .rb files I find, and add any MassTestCases I find into the current Suite.
• Coverage – I’d really like to have some kind of automated way to determine what the actual domain of a set of tests ought to be, and then to determine if I hit them all.
• I also would like to see about making the web related tests I’m doing be more robust – I think I probably ought to push off redirects until the actual tests, and I’d love to be testing content somehow.
• Which does suggest memoization as a general feature. It might be nice to be able to record data in the course of a test, and then check against it later.