By Becky Arnold, University of Sheffield. On the 30th of January 2019, Christopher Woods, an EPSRC fellow at the Advanced Computing Research Centre at the University of Bristol gave a talk on "How to Design and Engineer Good Code for Research" at the University of Sheffield.
Why and how to test your code?
With Autumn just around the corner, September has seen some exciting activities within the Institute’s Research Software Group. We’re helping improve the testing of Grid accounting software used by the Large Hadron Collider, we’re assessing the sustainability of a web service that supports greater fitness, and we’ve had a record number of applications into the recently closed Open Call!
Automated tests provide a way to check that research software both produces scientifically-valid results and that it continues to do so if it is extended, refactored, optimised or tidied. Yet one challenge that can face researchers, especially those with large, legacy codes, is this - where to start?
As part of a recent open call collaboration with the Distance project at the University of St. Andrews, I was asked about open source tools to automatically test GUI-based applications on Windows.
By coincidence, an EPCC colleague had recently asked me the same question. So, I hit Google and Wikipedia, tracked down some candidates and decided to try the free open source AutoHotKey toolkit. In this blog post, I describe my experiences with this "scriptable desktop automation" tool.