>It is very easy to say ‘test your code’, but
>the problem is when you are a master student,
>nobody teaches you programming, and people
>expect you to produce big results without
>efforts.

We hope our articles help a bit :-)

I completely sympathise, having been there myself. I’m afraid the solution is often to teach oneself the relevant skills, as you have done.

I’m still working on how to communicate to collaborators/supervisors etc that producing high quality code takes time. I think that because scientists are naturally skeptical, trying to provide proof/evidence is a good way forward.

After one year or two that I have been programming, I have found a good solution in using three python tools:
- doctests which allow you to write quick and easy to understand tests, especially useful for the documentation; I use them for all my ‘on the fly’ scripts, even if I am unaware that I am leaving some tests behind;
- python’s unittest, which is fine and allows to define fixtures, essential for bigger tests
- nose, which is a tool for automatic test discovery in python code (it means that it looks for all the function with the word ‘test_’ in your code, and execute them)

I am unaware of the testing solutions in other programming languages. I have tried some modules on perl a bit, but didn’t like them very much.

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