Putting It to the Test

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Når tiden er knap og pengene små er der to ting som ryger først ... test og dokumentation ... sørgelige facts ...
/Sik

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When time is sparse and the money too small there are two kamikaze candidates ... the tests and the documentations ... sad facts ...
/Sik

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Historically, testing hasn't gotten much respect in the world of software development.  As the old saying goes, "It compiles! Ship it!" Only a joke — but like most jokes, it hides a grain of truth. [...]

We run a lot of different tests. Tests of security. Tests of UI functionality. Tests of startup time, page-load speed, DOM manipulation, memory usage.  Tests for memory errors using Rational Purify. WebKit's suite of layout tests. Hundreds of unit tests to make sure that individual methods are still doing what they should. At last count, we run more than 9100 individual tests, typically 30-40 times every weekday.^[1] You can find the full list in the developer documentation, but I'll talk more about one broad category here: performance testing.

With every change made in the tree, we keep track of Chromium's page-load time, memory usage, startup time, the time to open a new tab or switch to one, and more.  All these data points are available in graphs like this one:

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Read more: http://blog.chromium.org/2008/11/putting-it-to-test.html

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