[cairo] Pixel consistency? (testing)

[Michael Urman]

On Wed, Aug 19, 2009 at 06:36, Ian Britten<britten at caris.com> wrote:
> Irregardless, I still have an awkward reality:  If I say that my
> image-production stuff is 'done and tested', but I'm not actually
> producing *images*, I'm sure some eyebrows would be raised.  I
> suspect that whatever other testing I may do, I _still_ need to
> produce+compare images, and will thus be susceptible pixel
> differences in the images triggering failures...

In part this depends on the kind of testing you're required to do.
Earlier you mentioned unit testing, for which such a stopping point is
perfectly reasonable. One fundamental assumption of unit testing is
that all the code's dependencies work correctly, so you only need to
test that you call them correctly. System, integration, and/or
regression testing can cover these wider collections of code, so
that's where your need to test start to finish may return. Chances are
the eyebrow raisers would want some of that wider coverage, if only to
catch worst case scenarios when dependencies break down.

Nomenclaturally yours,
-- 
Michael Urman