Personal unit testing within org mode?

Personal unit testing within org mode?

[Oliver Charles]

Personal unit tests [1] are unit tests for life. You give yourself a
few clear goals that you must pass daily (or perhaps weekly) and try
to reach them. By reviewing and evaluating the goals every morning
they are clear in your head and to me they seem like a great way to
change behaviour and habits.

At least, I thought that in theory a while ago, but never got round to
finding a simple way to integrate them into my life.

org-habit which came out recently has given me motivation to start
work on making org-punit, but before I start work on my first ever bit
of real Elisp (which is going to take some learning anyway!), I wanted
to quickly let you guys know how I plan to do this.

I think tests can be defined as a new keyword sequence: (sequence
"TEST" "|" "PASSED" "FAILED"). All unit tests are set to repeat daily,
and have state change logging enabled. So when you move from TEST ->
PASSED, it logs this and then moves back to TEST. SImple so far right?

Well another important part is being able to review how well I've done
in the last week, and this is where org-habit comes in. I'm thinking
of ripping off that little graph it produces, but the problem I have
is where should I put it? Do you think it will work in the agenda, or
should I generate some type of custom view? Perhaps something like
generating time clock reports?

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this!

-- 
    Oliver Charles / aCiD2

Re: Personal unit testing within org mode?

[John Wiegley]

On Oct 23, 2009, at 6:08 AM, Oliver Charles wrote:

> I think tests can be defined as a new keyword sequence: (sequence
> "TEST" "|" "PASSED" "FAILED"). All unit tests are set to repeat daily,
> and have state change logging enabled. So when you move from TEST ->
> PASSED, it logs this and then moves back to TEST. SImple so far right?
>
> Well another important part is being able to review how well I've done
> in the last week, and this is where org-habit comes in. I'm thinking
> of ripping off that little graph it produces, but the problem I have
> is where should I put it? Do you think it will work in the agenda, or
> should I generate some type of custom view? Perhaps something like
> generating time clock reports?

Doesn't org-habit, with repeating tasks, already give you just what  
you've described above?  All you need to do is add the todo states to  
your #+TODO line at the top of your Org file.  Then they will repeat  
as you've described, and reporter progress below.  You'd have to  
simulate FAILED condition by just not recording the task as done, and  
a PASSED if you do achieve it.  Then the habits graph could be  
meaningful for this.

John