Testing edge cases and undocumented behavior

[Scott Ritchie]

On 08/26/2011 12:52 AM, Francois Gouget wrote:
> On Thu, 25 Aug 2011, Vincent Povirk wrote:
> [...]
>> * Is a Windows application likely to need this?
> 
> I'd add a couple of factors that pertain to this:
>  * Is the behavior documented by the MSDN? If yes then applications are 
>    more likely to rely on it.
> 
>  * Does the behavior correspond to a known usage pattern? If yes, then 
>    even if not documented in the MSDN, applications are likely to depend 
>    on it. Two examples:
>    - APIs that take an 'LPSTR output_buffer, DWORD *buffer_size' pair of
>      parameters. If they allow the programmer to pass 'NULL, &size' 
>      where size=0 as parameters to determine the required buffer size, 
>      then you can expect applications to make use of it even if the MSDN 
>      forgot to document it.
>    - APIs that take output parameters and will simply not fill them if 
>      the pointer is NULL instead of crashing.


Incidentally, this is basically what the series of tests I wrote that
prompted this discussion check.  They're currently at "pending" in patch
tracker.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb759980

> 
> 
> Of course the first thing to test is that these are are actually 
> supported across a broad swath of the more recent Windows versions.
> 
> 

Do you think testbot handles that nicely?

Thanks,
Scott Ritchie