Intro

As Mahout matures, solid testing procedures are needed. This page and its children capture test plans along with ideas for improving our testing.

Test Plans

• 0.6
• Test Plans for the 0.6 release There are no special plans except for unit tests, and user testing of the Hadoop jobs.

Test Ideas

Regressions/Benchmarks/Integrations

• Algorithmic quality and speed are not tested, except in a few instances. Such tests often require much longer run times (minutes to hours), a running Hadoop cluster, and downloads of large datasets (in the megabytes).
• Standardized speed tests are difficult on different hardware.
• Unit tests of external integrations require access to externals: HDFS, S3, JDBC, Cassandra, etc.

Apache Jenkins is not able to support these environments. Commercial donations would help.

Unit Tests

Mahout’s current tests are almost entirely unit tests. Algorithm tests generally supply a few numbers to code paths and verify that expected numbers come out. ‘mvn test’ runs these tests. There is “positive” coverage of a great many utilities and algorithms. A much smaller percent include “negative” coverage (bogus setups, inputs, combinations).

Other