Re: Credits for tests

Marcus Boerger wrote:

Hello all, I just had an idea for the new credits section in the tests. Since only the new once have them, we could add them for all tests by adding them from CVS, by submitter. Anyone interested in taking this on? I can see a little problem with that. As I have commit rights I've added tests for other people and would not wish to be credited for their work. When we ran the London TestFest event some people thought the --CREDITS-- section was a good idea and used it, others preferred to remain anonymous. Asa far as I can remember it was about 50:50.

The other idea was about using these tags more. Since each tag consists of easy parseable lines, we could generate bar charts. Or we could allow to search for them on gcov.php.net. Heck we could even allow to 'sponsored' links in the section. So company XYZ could get a link http://xyz.com if we submit their tests. That would look like: --CREDITS-- Foo Bar <foo.bar@xyz.com> XYZ (http://xyz.com) --... To distinguish between them I chose () for links as opposed to <> for mails. However that is not really necessary as we can detect whether it is a link or a mail address easily. Any thoughts on this? Wild - no idea it would work or not, but definitely worth finding out.

In case this is not clear, I want to make writing tests more attractive to get up in test coverage. Up as much as possible. In fact I want to raise the coverage from 0%-50%,50%-75%,75%-100% to 0%-75%,75%-85%,85%-100%. That is I especially want to show green only for 85%+ instead of 75%+ right now. And imo anyone thinking 50% test coverage is any usefull is damn wrong, so I changed from 50%+ to 75%+ as well. Completely agree, and personally, even if there is 100% line coverage I don't think that's enough. I can write tests that will cover 100% of the lines and still not test a function properly.

How to encourage or motivate more test writers is an interesting question, I had been considering it from the point of view of people writing tests in their spare time, which I think is what most people (myself included at the moment) do. In this case the motivations that I can understand are personal satisfaction, maybe developing a CV (if I'm interviewing people I always look for open source involvement), self education (learning PHP better). Your suggestion above is coming at it from a different angle - what if people had time, as part of their day job, to write tests? Zoe