While I did not know Bill Kent, his books sound very interesting.

A brief update

I'm in in the final throes of preparation for our tutorial at PyCon, next week. 42 attendees -- woot!

I spent the last few days hacking on our unit tests, fixing path-related issues and working on code coverage and profiling. I've also been adding a bunch of twill tests. We're up to 94% overall code coverage, and we're at a good resting point -- anything higher would involve testing very obscure corner cases that are better tested in other ways.

Miscellaneous observations:

• coverage.py is fantastic, but it's difficult to control from within a customised testing infrastructure. I spent an hour or two today ripping out the implicit loading and saving of the coverage cache, so that I can precisely control when coverage is done and don't have to worry about stale coverage results.

• I didn't realize until I started digging into it that nose, our unit test framework of choice, is based on unittest.py. It's pretty easy to get lost in all that code when figuring out whether or not you want to customize the unittest-based behavior or the nose-specific behavior.

• Andy Wingo's statprof is pretty cool, and it's very easy to use. I spent a bit of time hacking on it, and in the process fixed the two lines that rendered it incompatible with Python 2.3. I've also dealt with some output-related issues. Andy's OKed my redistribution of the module, so I'll slap the fixes/patches up on a darcs repository soon. (Watch This Space.)

I'm looking forward to releasing all of our code into the wild. We've done a lot of work; even if the application itself isn't where I want it to be, much of our testing framework is solid.

--titus