[erlang-questions] test driven development

[Ulf Wiger]

2007/11/25, Håkan Stenholm <hokan.stenholm@REDACTED>:
>
> On the other hand, during the time I worked at Ericsson (1998-2002) it
> wasn't until around 2000, that we started to write automated tests for
> the AXD301 (there where lots of manual system and unit tests though)
> e.g. it took several years after the AXDs initial creation before
> automated testing was implemented.

Not to disagree with this account, but I'd like to add, for the record,
that when the AXD301 started in 1996, OTP didn't even exist, except
mainly on the planning board. There was a predecessor, called BOS,
which our designers had to learn and start experimenting with. When
the first version of OTP came in 1997, they had to start studying the
differences... Needless to say, there wasn't any well established
automated testing framework for OTP at the time, and we had a
product to build.

We delivered the first version of AXD 301 late 1998. At that time,
the OTP team had an internal framework for automated testing, and
we started discussing the possibility of it becoming a supported
component. I was happy to hear that it will be in the upcoming R12B
release. (:

We did start using the Erlang/OTP test framework in 1999, but based
on the agreement that we received a snapshot of the code and didn't
expect support.

The Erlang/OTP team has been using automated testing for many
years, in other words. Automated testing of products like the AXD 301
is more difficult, since there are lots of dependencies to hardware,
network and operators. That's one reason why it took longer to build
a considerable automated test suite. Nowadays, it /is/ considerable,
with well over 10,000 test cases, most automated (as far as I know).

BR,
Ulf W