Makedrive Unit Testing

In most projects of similar breadth, understanding the big picture is paramount in the search of perfecting the design and function of the system itself. This week was crucial in my comprehension of how all the pieces need to integrate into the final product in order to satisfy all the desired end-user applications of the APIs that we're creating.

My assigned work was primarily focused on unit testing the sync route hierarchy that takes place when the end user initiates a file save from one of his active sessions. This is the perfect task for mastering one's familiarity with a complex codebases. A firm grasp of what each variable, function, and object contains and passes is paramount to successfully and efficiently test against the environment. On top of polishing up agnostic unit testing syntax and conventions, I inevitably have to traverse through all of the code in a way that isn't necessary to accomplish most other work. This is turning out to be an extremely fascinating and challenging endeavour, since valid user credentials from the client session as well as valid session objects including file and directory data must be present and persistent in order to initiate the sync sequences and were therefore arbitrarily mocked in order to successfully go through each route. This infrastructure was developed by project lead David Humphrey due to the time constrained nature of the current sprint, but the helper functions that I wrote and am presently using ended up emulating the same behaviour in order to achieve the similar goal of having to persist valid session data throughout the test process.

Backtracking to more fundamental concepts that I must still catch up on, I've taken the weekend to fill in some knowledge gaps with object context and scope in javascript. A great article I've found on this gives insight on this from the simplest to the more realistic use cases can be found here.

With the first of the 4 routes seeming to be properly implemented, and with the help of fellow teammate Kieran Sedgwick, I intend on finishing the test foundation for all of the primary sync routes by the end of today and start integrating this logic with rsync and websocket applications for the rest of the week.