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<P><FONT SIZE="5">2.7 Automated Regression Testing</FONT><BR>
<P>Automated regression testing is extremely important for
several reasons:
<P> <OL>
<LI> It allows portability problems to be pinpointed
when the program is moved to a new machine.
<LI> It provides confidence that changes made to the
program have not introduced bugs.
<LI> It provides ongoing confidence in the integrity
of FunnelWeb as a programming tool.
<LI> It provides a practical confirmation of the semantics
of FunnelWeb.
</OL>
<P>The simplest way to set up automated regression testing
is to construct a suite of test cases, each of which
consists of a test input file and a "correct answer"
output file. To test FunnelWeb, the input files are
processed and the resulting output files compared with the
correct answer output files.
<P>To automate such a list of tests, some kind of
scripting language is required. Unfortunately, at the time
of writing FunnelWeb (at least), there was no scripting
language that was available on all the platforms to which
FunnelWeb had to be ported (Macintosh, IBM-PC, Sun, and
OpenVMS). So, after some thought, I decided that the best
solution to the problem was to create a command language
<I>within FunnelWeb</I> that could be used as a framework
for the automation of the testing of the rest of FunnelWeb.
<P>The resultant scripting language is described in the
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