This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz by Ryan Davis. Original Post: refactoring tip: how to deal with failure overload Feed Title: Polishing Ruby Feed URL: http://blog.zenspider.com/index.rdf Feed Description: Musings on Ruby and the Ruby Community... Latest Ruby Buzz Posts Latest Ruby Buzz Posts by Ryan Davis Latest Posts From Polishing Ruby

(to try to make up for the previous rant)

I've been making big fundamental changes to ParseTree and consequently ruby2c's implementation and testing. As a result, I'm drowning in hundreds of failures (869 tests, 2217 assertions, 238 failures, 193 errors). Even though they run fairly fast, autotest isn't much help at this stage, so I resorted to (*gulp*) manual test runs, but with a small twist:

ruby test/test_type_checker.rb -n "/test_[a-b]/" | unit_diff

This lets me focus on one class, with only about 10 or so failures/errors at a time to keep the clutter down. As my favorite mgr used to say:

"Big alligators, Little alligators, Swamp."

With this technique, I work from the bottom up and slowly wade through and eventually drain the swamp.