Owen on Testing

In a larger post about keeping the scripts that produce WordPress’s syndication feeds up-to-date, Owen Winkler says the following:

Changes in significant areas of the software such as [comment- and category-focused APIs] would require exponentially significant testing. And as might have been noticed during our pains from the 2.0 release, WordPress could stand to have a bit more thorough testing generally. It doesn’t need the strain of testing on formats that we don’t even have an developer advocate strong enough to volunteer for coding and testing. Not only would someone have to adopt each of the four feed files, but we would need testers to focus on the changes in those areas. I don’t see enough people who care – Maybe you’re out there?

Owen, I don’t know enough about the ins and outs of these feeds to be of much use, but there are people who do. [Phil Ringnalda seems to care, and you could probably talk Sam Ruby into helping with test cases---and if nothing else, Sam's focus on it would get some interesting comments from Mark Pilgrim on the subject, and that would make enough of a kerfluffle to get some attention. ] But I am certainly arguing that we need to take time and figure out what testing needs to be done—fishbone diagrams, whatever.