Wow, the CDK hits a record low number of unit test fails!

As many of my readers know, John May recently started working as release manager of the CDK development branch, e.g. resulting in the CDK 1.5.3 development release. He has done very important work for the CDK otherwise too. He is clearly beyond the point of an active contributor, and putting his coding where is mouth is, and is improving the CDK all over the place (read his blog!).

And one of those itches he has (read The Cathedral and the Bazaar) is the unit tests. In fact, I like them too. Seeing in a table how many known issues there are, really encourages you at tackling them. And seeing them go down with every commit is very rewarding, or at least for me, and apparently for John too.

Anyway, in his drive to make the development branch of the CDK "stable", he is fixing quite a few long standing issues. That is hard work. You first need to get an idea of what goes wrong, when it started going wrong, what caused it, what the code was originally supposed to do, and only then you can start thinking of a fix. Well, he does. Repeatedly. And the result is shocking:

Never in the history of the CDK (well, at least not after we seriously started using unit tests), the number of fails (and errors) has been this low: 66 fails, 3 errors! Seriously, consider that it has even been higher before I introduced those ever failing coverage unit tests! We never really got below some 70 failing tests. Seriously. I mean, come on.

Bottom line is, the current CDK, not just the stable branch, but even master is more stable than CDK 1.0 ever was. Or any CDK version ever (perhaps except of the code by Christoph before he shared it with the world ;)

John, thanx! Your efforts give me a lot of motivation to continue to work on the CDK myself!