GSoC 2010 Melange Testing Project: Week 1 - learning the code base

It has been a very exciting week. In this week, I made a clone for the testing project, deployed Melange to my GAE instance, got the posting right for melange-dev blog, created a wiki page for the project, signed a Contributor License Agreement (CLA), submitted tax forms, got an ACM account (the courtesy of Google), had the first conference meeting with other developers of Melange, helped some Melange users to solve their log-in problems, and had meetings with my mentor (Sverre). What a week!

My main job in this week, however, was to learn the code base of Melange since my project is to add tests to the code base. In order to help me better understand the code base, I decided to visualize the organization of the code base and the relaionship of modules/classes. Felix' diagrams are very interesting. However, they are only for Melange data models whereas views and logic are more relavant for my project. So, I used a tree tool to generate the module organization of Melange (click the picture below to view the searchable full HTML file)

and module organization of Melange tests (click the picture below to view the searchable full HTML file)

and used pylint.pyreverse to generate the package diagram of Melange (click the picture below to view the searchable full PDF file)

and the class diagram of Melange (click the picture below to view the searchable full PDF file)

These diagrams have helped me a lot to learn the code base. Hope they are also helpful to others who want to learn the code base.

During my meeting with Sverre, he suggested me to start with the testing of the modules which are the most important and used most, e.g. soc.logic.models.base and soc.views.models.base. Therefore, my next week's plan is to start coding, specifically add more test cases to the existing tests of these modules, e.g. tests.app.soc.logic.models.base and tests.app.soc.views.models.base.

Following is a brief introduction to the testing project:

This project is to add unit test suites/cases for the logic and views of the existing modules. These test suites/cases will enable developers to refactor the existing code at any time while at the same time to ensure that they still work correctly by passing all the tests (i.e. regression testing). This project will also serve as a basis for the Melange team to switch the development methodology to test driven development.

Cheers,

Leo (Chong Liu)