on Aug 22nd, 2008Tests: Another way to contribute
There are many ways to contribute to an Eclipse project. Pointing out enhancement opportunities, finding and reporting bugs, contributing patches or new function, writing articles, updating the wiki, giving talks, beer for committers, …
Yesterday Tom Watson posted a message on the equinox-dev list (oh, another way to contribute, answer questions on the mailing lists and newsgroups). In this message Tom pointed out that some parts of the Equinox add-on “compendium” services could use some testing (hey, we’re not perfect). He made a great observation at the end of the post:
This is also an opportunity for anyone trying to get familiar or involved with Equinox and OSGi.
There are two parts to this. One is that test code is actually quite instructive wrt how various APIs are (and are not) expected to be used. This helps you learn.
The other is that inevitably there are parts of the code that are not tested. This may be where you have to do some investigation to understand the API. What better way to confirm your understanding than to write some focussed unit tests? What better to do with these test than to contribute them to the project in question? This helps the project and the community.
For my part, we just released the start of a test suite for p2’s new publisher function (itself released only last week). Anyone wanting to get into publishing p2 metadata and artifacts should check it out, learn about publishing and contribute to p2.
Talk about karma-points! You can almost feel your bug reports carrying more weight…