Next QA Hackathon - What Do You Need?
So I hear that the next Perl QA Hackathon will be in Vienna. What should we accomplish? The following is not complete as I was so focused on the areas I was working on that I really didn't follow the other areas.
In the first QA Hackathon, in Oslo, we nailed down a bunch of issues we'd like to see in TAP. We clarified part of the spec and started work on tests for TAP itself. (And convinced Nadim Khemir to release App::Asciio).
The second QA Hackathon, in Birmingham, UK, saw the creation of nested TAP (i.e., subtests).
The third one, I think, should result in either better parsing of nested TAP or shoe-horning structured diagnostics into TAP.
Another possibility is to do something really, really awful and take the most popular Perl testing modules and manually register all of their testing functions. By registering a function, we can better associate a diagnostic with a given test. This would also allow much cleaner behavior on Test::Most's 'die' and 'bail' on fail behaviors. It's an internal hack which should be invisible to most people writing tests, but if you're writing test modules, it makes a lot of sense to be explicit about what your testing functions are.
What's important, though, is what you want to see produced. If there's consensus, maybe shifting priorities would be good?
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The most valuable new (relatively) tool in my testing toolbox is "autoprove" from Test::Continuous. It's less about QA and much more about TDD but still, I'd like people to love it more because it has some rough edges requiring deep knowledge of Perl testing framework guts I don't have to fix myself.
How about actually getting Test::Builder2 finished and shipped?
I'd also be interested in a brainstorming session about the "big rocks" in the Perl QA world. The Oslo Consensus was a nice outcome of the first hackathon and I wonder if there are other things that would benefit from a similar approach.