on Sun Apr 01 2007, Stefan Seefeld <seefeld-AT-sympatico.ca> wrote:
Unfortunately, I don't believe all build variants _are_ tested. But anyway, I don't understand what you mean about modularity and slowdowns. The tests are distributed across many machines. If you dedicate a single testing machine to one toolchain and build variant, you can't do this much faster. Many testers do incremental testing, so only the changed stuff gets rebuilt.
You are right, the total execution time is still the same. However, a more modular system is more easily parallelizable.
I still don't know what you mean by "more modular"
More testers could contribute cycles as the resource requirements wouldn't be quite as high. This, then, makes the cycles from checkin to report containing associated test results smaller, helping to get fixes in quicker. Etc. etc.
Maybe you're suggesting that tests of the whole suite on a single compiler and platform could be distributed across many machines? That could be vulnerable to small platform differences, but maybe there's a way around that. -- Dave Abrahams Boost Consulting www.boost-consulting.com Don't Miss BoostCon 2007! ==> http://www.boostcon.com