How one goes on testing a threaded program, apart from doing a few
successful runs and crossing his fingers that it at least follows the
'correct 99.9999% of the time' rule ?
If you haven't been in there and stepped through all the code, looked for a reasonable set of test cases, and tried those test cases, then you haven't tested! :-)
You test a threaded program the same way you test a non-threaded
program. Thoroughly. Test cases. YOu don't *have* to write unit tests,
but it sure helps. Code running a few times isn't tested. If you
prefer to test manually, really want to be thorough you have to find ways to make sure you've done coverage of a reasonable set of test cases. How do I get myself a set of test cases? Personally I like to walk through my code in a debugger and ask myself "how could this go wrong?". "What if I pass a huge amount of data in here? How unresponsive can I find ways to make this thread get?" "If this is a network communications thread, let's try all the various error conditions that can happen on a real network.". ...
When I think of an idea on how things could go wrong ("What happens if
the data isn't here or is invalid?"/"Where should I be catching exceptions and how should I be handling them?")
Regards,
Warren -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
