Re: gnubol: automatical testing

[RKRayhawk@aol.com]

I know you all are talking high level when you are talking automatic testing 
and regression testing.  These notes are at a less stratospheric level.

Even before automating the testing process, it is possibly reasonable to 
consider automating the test case generation process.

It would in the first instance be useful to have a number of basic programs 
that are mind-numbingly simple. Like a truely simple data division and then 
one program after another that has just a simple isolated statement in the 
procedure division.  These are actually needed by early tester to avoid 
complications caused by not being able to test a basic verb because something 
else is broken.  Any thing that can gen those automatically could easily be 
enhanced to begin simple combinations: like procedure divisions with all 
arithmetic verbs illustrated.

At a slightly higher level we could possibly automate the combination and 
permutation of conditional statements in conditional statements.  It is 
possibly a useful idea to consider automating the generation of nested IFs 
and nested EVALUATES, rather than hand coding it. If it is a machine, we  
could perhaps easily rig it to nest IinE and EinI.

Also easily mechanised might be the generation of programs that confront the 
compiler with lots of missing this and that issues. For example, lets say an 
automatic program generator has a list of all standard divisions, sections 
and paragraph names, and sample entries for each.

One by one generate whole programs that are just missing one of those, or 
just two of those.
Or again, transpose the standard things like data division and procedure 
division. Or jam the
linkage section in front of the working-storage section.  Again in an 
automated manner gen programs one by one that leave off just one SECTION, or 
just one period. A variation of that for user names in the procedure division 
sections and paragraphs would be nice too. 

There are a lot of these kinds of things that could be generated 
automatically.

Bob Rayhawk





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