Kevin Bridges

Today was the first official day of the Paris Code Sprint. Approximately 50-60 Drupalers from around the world gathered on the first floor to learn about and discuss Drupal while the sprinters gathered upstairs to solidify and unify our testing efforts. Ori Pekelman of AF83 has been a gracious and entertaining host providing the foundation for a good amount of discussion and coding.

Primary among the new developments was the resounding identification for the need to provide Code Coverage for Drupal. Dries Buytaert, Rok Žlender, Charlie Gordon, Jimmy Berry, Kevin Bridges, Douglas Hubler and Andy Kirkham (remote from Scotland) participated in the discussion. The concept of DCOV (Drupal Code Coverage) is to allow developers, testers, reviewers and just about anyone with an interest to see what parts of Drupal Core are currently covered by test scripts, whether they pass or fail and other basic metrics including function execution times, invocation counts, etc. This will provide additional basic profiling on various aspects of the tests that are performed as part of the function test cycles. A prime example of usage of this data would be to evaluate what percentage of a documents code was run during the processing of a specific SimpleTest. In addition, the community at large should be able to run tests locally reporting findings back to the testing group.

A good example of how this reporting could be used by the Drupal community are visible in the reporting component of the PHP QA Team's Code coverage testing known as GCOV. The GCOV site is an automated system that checks out from various RELEASES and SNAPHOTS of PHP from CVS, builds them and then runs the PHPT test suite. DCOV is a coverage tool that will be designed to show how far the tests went, what PHP user space functions were executed (with pass/fail data acquired from the test layer above) and the other metrics of interest. Rok and Charlie have been able to get a proof of concept working.

Additionally, we were able to finish the automatic generation of test stubs. A plan was put in place to define how test stubs and unit testing will work together. Once testing of the work is complete, Jimmy Berry will be posting additional details on his blog. Simpletestauto was modified to allow for easier distribution and configuration among multiple servers by Kevin Bridges. Charlie Gordon gave an excellent session on Simpletest to the Paris Drupal Camp laying the foundation for educating Drupal Developers on how and why they should participate in our testing efforts in addition to getting the trigger test errors under control. We would like to see these educational presentations spread to Drupal Meetups and Camps around the world.

It is time to break for dinner, but we will be back tonight to continue working ... pictures and more details are upcoming ... adieu for now.