[OSM-dev] GSoC Suggestion: test.osm suite

[Tim Teulings]

Hello!

During my work on libosmscout I had the (obvious) idea to test the various
implementation aspect of my library against or (or multiple) defined *.osm
files.

This would have included testing for functionality like rendering things
like bridges, tunnels, layers and symbols but also routing correctly in
respect of turn restrictions, maxspeed, cross border navigation...

For this one or multiple syntetic *.osm file(s) would be optimal, that
includes all these features in a stable way (ids of nodes, ways, areas do
not
change, feature do not disapear or reapear somwhere else).

However up to now I had not the time to work on this...

My suggestion for GSoC thus would be to let a student develop such test
files,
resulting in a first version af an ACID-lik test for OSM based map drawing
and
routing tools.

Work would be split into a number of steps:
* Collecting the most important features to test (ask the community)
* Defining an abstract test suite by categorizing these features and
defining
  small abstract test scenarious.
* Design of an environment that allows getting and changing the data,
  and possibly also not only offers *.osm files but also API instances
based on
  these data  
* Documentation of environment and change processes  
* Creation of actual data files

Note, that not all step require develpment, in fact the development part is
possibly very low, so this might be a problem to get it accepted.
Nevertheless this would be possibly of great help for a huge number of
existing
OSM developers and IMHO testing is a huge and underestimated part of
software
development.

Any opinions about that? Does this make sense? Improvement/addition
suggestions?

-- 
Gruß...
    Tim