Deliverable 2 Meta-Experience

From my title you should be able to deduce that the bulk of this blog post will be about the experience I, and my team, had whenever we presented our second deliverable for our testing project.

What I thought was going to be a glorious experience turned out to be one of the more horrific experiences I have had. I thought I had set my team up to be pretty far ahead in our project by already coding up our test cases and having HTML output. Apparently, though, the way I was conducting the tests did not follow the exact specifications for my Software Engineering class. I incorporated a couple of the file calls from Galaxy into my test cases and apparently that is not allowed. We have to, instead, reinvent the wheel. I was improving upon Galaxy's testing suite by implementing a way to conduct individual tests from individual tools (something they have listed in their documentation and wiki as something they need to do). Instead, though, we have to develop a testing suite that stands alone from the Galaxy project. The way I was doing it would be great to have submitted to Galaxy, but it would require too much work to do that and fit the specifications for the Software Engineering team project. While this is disappointing, this is the work that I have been given and, much like in the real-world when working for a company, the work given by the customer is the work that needs to be done.

All in all, this has been a good learning experience, though frustratingly wasteful for me when considering the amount of time I dumped into the functional testing.

The next step for my group and me is to examine the individual units that underlie the functions we have been examining. We have been examining the "Upload Data" toolset and this toolset has a multitude of helper functions that it requires in order to run. By extracting these helper functions, we can test each of them individually which, in essence, is a parallelization of unit testing as this goes hand-in-hand with it. If we can establish unit tests that work on these helper functions, then we may be able to work our way all the way up to testing a function that utilizes these test cases, which, in essence, is creating a functional test. In my eyes, this would be an immense, intensive learning experience that everyone in my team can benefit from.

Music listened to while blogging: The C90s