Thursday, October 26, 2006

In the spirit of Alan Perlis...

"The pain of testing for bottom-up development is producing test data without a front-end. The pain of testing for top-down development is that you can't."
- Richard Cobbe

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

What does this epigram even mean? If I bottom up something I just need the test data for the lower parts, if I top down it I need just smaller and simpler test cases in the beginning.

I can bottom up a compiler by start testing scanning/lexing/parsing or type checking or optimizations without having to use an actual source program as test data. If I want to top down it I just need to start testing with very simple programs (e.g. Hello World, the empty program).