[Ns-developers] First Stab at Validation and Verification

[L.Wood@surrey.ac.uk]

My take is that, of all these test types, only the validation
tests are special/different, as they relate to model output more than
internal simulator mechanisms...

<http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/L.Wood/><L.Wood at surrey.ac.uk>



-----Original Message-----
From: ns-developers-bounces at ISI.EDU on behalf of Mathieu Lacage
Sent: Tue 2009-04-21 20:04
To: ns-developers at ISI.EDU
Subject: Re: [Ns-developers] First Stab at Validation and Verification
 
On Tue, 2009-04-21 at 18:53 +0100, L.Wood at surrey.ac.uk wrote:
> One terminology thing that's always bugged me is that, while ns has
> had
> validation tests seemingly forever, talk of regression testing was
> never
> around for ns2. And validating the models vs testing for regressions
> in
> behaviour strike me as slightly different in aim.
> 
> validation - is this model behaviour useful and realistic?
> regression - is this model behaviour consistently unchanged by code
> changes not intended to change the model behaviour?
> 
> The scope of the tests for these seems different. But they've
> both been lumped under 'validation' to date.

There are about 20 different adjectives you can use to qualify tests:
unit tests, system tests, integration tests, regression tests,
validation tests, whitebox tests, blackbox tests, etc. You could try to
tag all the blackbox tests and the regression tests with a special
directory, but, then, the problem is that you could also arbitrarily
decide to tag only the blackbox tests in a special directory, etc. My
point is that I don't see any useful obvious single-level classification
system to sort tests so, it seems to me that it's just simpler to dump
them all in the same location (say, randomly, 'tests' :) and, document
in each test what you are testing and how.

Mathieu