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Dustin J. Mitchell

Retroactive Unit Tests

07 Feb 2008

Amanda has, for a long time, shipped with an asynchronous communication library, called event. It supports the usual suspects: reading and writing file descriptors, timeouts, and arbitrarily triggerable events. It’s actually commented a bit better than most of Amanda, but only with vaguely suggestive sentences, rather than rigorous descriptions of behavior.

It has come time to “re-base” this particular library to use glib’s GMainLoop, because other, newer parts of the code will be based on GMainLoop, and everyone needs to play nice together. The process is relatively clear: write thorough unit tests against which the existing implementation passes, then check the new implementation against those tests. This means writing unit tests against existing code that someone else wrote. That’s hard.

My initial selection of unit tests gave my new implementation a PASS on the first try, so I fired up a backup process, which seemed to work, and then a recovery, which failed miserably. Many, many hours of hand-tracing code later, I uncovered two behaviors of the event library which were completely undocumented. I won’t make a guess as to whether they were intentional and undocumented or unintentional and just happened to work. I’ve now adjusted the comments appropriately, and added unit tests to tickle the funny behavior, but things are still broken.

[EDIT: this sat in my “drafts” folder for no reason]