I recently had an upstream reviewer telling me that I should not randomise my test input because “randomness does not provide a useful input to the test and sets a bad example of practices for writing tests”.
I am going to explain here why this is wrong and it’s actually good practice to randomise inputs. Let me start by saying that random test failures are not the same thing as spurious test failures. I’ll come back to that later.
One of the things that’s frustrating about being a Launchpad Developer is waiting three hours for the test suite to complete. It’s always irked me that my quad-core sat there with three idle cores, and parallelising the tests would be tough, so I thought I’d try and partition the tests across some virtual machines.
I know pretty much nothing about VMs so I was pretty pleased to come across this JeOS VMBuilder resource! I got my first VM built pretty quick with it, but then, what next? The instructions don’t tell me how to actually run up my new VM.
So, I had a little chuckle to myself when I saw this blog post from Dustin Kirkland just appear! I’m going to try his suggestions out now and see how it works out, but it looks like just what I need.