GSoC 2010 Melange Testing Project: Week 12 (Final) of the Coding Period

In this week, I have cleaned up, commited and pushed all the tasks testing code to my online clone. I also worked on adding test cases for soc.logic.cleaning with suggestion of Sverre. Besides, I have also uncovered a couple of bugs in the soc.modules.ghop.tasks.task_update module and sent a patch to the mailing list. Lennard was very kind to help me merge the patch. I have also uncovered one issue with my test code for soc.modules.gsoc.tasks.accept_proposals (set the timelimit parameter too small) and then corrected it. In addition, I have also investigated the diference between the console and html coverage report. It seems that the console one counts statements while the html one counts lines.

When I tried to move the the gaetestbed and pymox modules to buildout dependencies, however, I found the easy_installed versions of both modules have problems (easy_install is used during Melange buildout). For gaetestbed, I found that the gaetestbed on PyPi is an old version which cannot check the html body of an email. So, I emailed the author to ask him to put the latest version onto PyPI. The author (JJ Geewax) was very kind to have helped me do it. For pymox, the easy_installed version available is a quite old version (0.5.0) which has a bug fixed in the later versions. Unfortunately, these newer versions are not available on PyPi, so not easy_install searchable. I reported the issue to the project issue tracker. One of its authors (Steve) was also very kind to helped me to put a newer version (0.5.3) to PyPi. After all these problems have been sorted out, there remains one issue that gaetestbed currently depends on webtest even though you do not need this part of function due to the design of gaetestbed, which the author agreed to resolve in the near future. After consulting Sverre, I finally moved the the gaetestbed and pymox modules to buildout dependenciesi and then commited and pushed the change to my online clone.

In the next week, I will add the experience of how to do mail and taskqueue related tests with gaetestbed to the testing wiki page, make a patch for removing the cron/job related modules and then send it to the list as well as add more test cases for existing Melange modules.

This is the last week of GSoC2010. It was a quite exciting and enjoyable summer. My project is very interesting, my mentor (Sverre), other developers (Lennard, Daniel, Madhusudan, Mario) and GSoC administrator (Carol) are very helpful, and my fellow students (Felix, Pavel and Savitha) are also very nice people to work with. Specially thank my wonderful mentor, Sverre, who is always ready to help me out when I got stuck and without whom I may not complete my project. During this period of time, I have also learned a lot about GAE and Melange, I have also come up with something useful and merged to the trunk, and uncovered several issues. Though the program has ended, it does not mean the end of my project or my involement in Melange. On the contrary, I will continue to work on the testing project after GSoC, i.e. add more test cases for more modules, improve the testing design and code, integrate Felix' data seeder, and so on, which have not been done because of the time limit of GSoC or dependency. I also hope to work for Melange beyond the testing project and hopefully become one core developer of Melange in the future. I also wish to come up some ideas to improve Melange so that I can serve as a mentor for Melange in the next GSoC and experience the excitement of these guys about the upcoming mentor summit :-).