Automated Regression Testing

regressiontesting

Automated regression testing is extremely important for two reasons:

  1. It provides confidence that changes made to the program have not introduced bugs.

  2. It allows portability problems to be pinpointed when the program is moved to a new machine.

The simplest way to set up automated regression testing is to construct a suite of test cases (and their solutions) and then write a script in the target machine's command language to run through the suite. Unfortunately, there is no command language that is shared among the machines to which FunnelWeb must be ported. These machines are at least: Macintosh, IBM-PC, Sun, VMS Vax.

One option is simply to rewrite the script in each machine's particular command language. This would be a feasible option were it not for the fact that the Macintosh (the machine upon which FunnelWeb was developed) does not have a command language!

After some thought, I decided that the best solution to the problem was to create a command language ıwithin FunnelWeb. FunnelWeb could then be invoked in two modes, one-shot command line or interactive/script. This approach had the benefit of providing total control over the command language and its complete portability.

The result is described in the ıFunnelWeb User's Manual.