unit testing

[dustinvtran]

Start formalizing unit testing procedure. #1 also relevant

[dawenl]

That's a good way to remind me :)

[ido]

1. Think about setting up a .travis.yml for travis-ci or jenkins to compile (n/a yet) and run tests.
2. Write regression tests (e.g. in pytest or nose) that run all current examples and verify breakage.
3. Add unit tests (e.g. in pytest or nose) for distributions, variationals, models, etc. as necessary

[dawenl]

I think nose would be a good option here (I also have more experience with it).

[dustinvtran]

I have experience with none of the above. You have dictatorial status on this @dawenl :)

[ido]

@dawenl: From the nose webpage I linked: "New projects should consider using Nose2, py.test, or just plain unittest/unittest2." Good luck! You may need @dustinvtran to set up Travis-CI once you create a .travis.yml file (or whoever is an admin/owner of the blei-lab GH org).

[akucukelbir]

@dawenl what's wrong with https://docs.python.org/2/library/unittest.html ?

[dustinvtran]

Fyi @dawenl: Alp's unit tests (https://github.com/Blei-Lab/blackbox/blob/master/tests/test_check_is_tf_vector.py; https://github.com/Blei-Lab/blackbox/blob/master/tests/test_log_sum_exp.py) use the above library. Mine is bad in that it just prints stuff. Totally up to you on the framework to choose and then making that change to all the current unit tests.

[dawenl]

@akucukelbir It's just I've been using nosetest for some of my other projects (but looks like now we should switch to nose2), and as far as I know nose is based on unittest with more convenient support and API.

[akucukelbir]

@dawenl okay sounds good. let's go with whatever you decide. just point us to a nice example once you're done, so that we can write new tests in a similar style. (awesome!)

[dawenl]

After some initial investigation, it seems that nose2 dropped some of commonly used functions by me (e.g. assert_raises, eq_, etc.) back to unittest, so the unit tests written by @akucukelbir would work perfectly fine with nose2. I am re-writing some of the tests by @dustinvtran but overall there will not be a lot of work here.

[dawenl]

oops, looks like travis.CI will only work for free if the project is public. @dustinvtran any thoughts?

[ido]

CircleCI is an alternative.

On Mar 14, 2016, at 01:14, Dawen Liang notifications@github.com wrote:

oops, looks like travis.CI will only work for free if the project is public. @dustinvtran any thoughts?

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[dustinvtran]

@dawenl Sure that's okay. Let's integrate travis once we release it publicly then.

[dustinvtran]

Now that we decided on a framework and most of the unit tests have been converted, I vote this issue being solved. We can discuss unit testing robots in #1 (and robots in general :).