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PolyBoRi was created by man. There are two developers. And they have a plan.“

Saturday, January 29, 2011

How important unit tests are

Last year we started to add pure unit tests (based on boost::test) to PolyBoRi. Albeit PolyBoRi already owns an extensive test suite (with hundreds of examples from computational algebra, cryptanalysis and electro engineering), we found several faulty routines. Most of the newly discovered problems were triggered by data, which lies slightly outside the specifications. Here, specification is not a formal term: it's merely the sum of all implicit assumptions arising from our applications. Over the last months the unit tests helped us to make those more explicit which improved our source a lot.

Finally, I fixed the last few issues tonight. So PolyBoRi 0.7 hits the road!

My best,
  Alexander