Dear Allin and Jack, and all other Gretl contributors,
As you may know I am a Software Tester (one of my many skills :) ).
I have noticed sometimes that there are Regressions (errors in Gretl that were fixed, and later reappeared) and new Bugs like today's exponent prevalence.
This must be the best Open Source project, where bugs are detected, reported and fixed (within the hour :). (And sometimes code improvements, too!)
Well, I am offering my contribution to:
- have a server to do Regression Testing (which I already have setup in my home)
- create a Unit tests structure, to be run with every code commit
- create an Acceptance/Regression Tests structure to be run periodically, especially before releasing new versions.
So, I would need to know if there are already any kind of Unit tests, and to collect as many as possible Gretl files that would use public datasets (like the ones coming with Gretl), or datasets prepared for testing.
For the Unit tests I have not yet studied the best Framework (maybe plain C language coding), for the other cases, I plan to use Robot Framework (which is my favorite). (You folks could benefit from using Robot Framework to do Data Mining as you may program to simulate the user clicking on web pages with browsers and obtaining files.)