Testing

[etuleu]

Testing axon

Why do we need tests?

1. Learn the codebase and show proper api usage
2. Make sure new changes don't break core functionality

What are the axon primitives?

If you look at examples/bench repo, which builds and trains a simple model, we can identify:
network, prjn, time, layer

We should have unit tests for all functions in these packages.

If we dig a little deeper into neuron we will find a few more packages such as learn, inhib, act, pool, synapse.

There are also some utility / helper packages such as: logging, time, helpers, looper.

For slightly more complicated things that interact across packages we should have tests that execute quickly (under 10 seconds).

For models that are made up of multiple components we should have model tests, which might take longer to run. We can run them in CI if it's under the maximum allowed time or in infra.

So, roughly each package in axon should have a parallel _test package.

We can use go build tags to separate the different types of tests.

We should also first setup code coverage in github so we can have a measure of testing.