Test Driven Development in R

Hi,
I wonder what kind of interest there is on Test Driven Development (TDD) 
in R.

Test Driven Development consists of writing the test before the 
function, and iteratively build the function until it passes the test.

Python and Ruby (specially Ruby) have very strong test-oriented 
cultures. In fact, in Ruby at least the custom is to do TDD and lately 
Behavior-driven development (BDD). In BDD, one writes a story of what 
one would want the code to do. This story is almost native English, and 
then the test suite converts it into something that the language 
understand as tests.

There are some posts on the list about this, but they are about testing 
in general (Runit), not TDD. Example:
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.r.general/85047

Recently, I found there is an alpha, but working implementation of TDD 
for Komodo edit:
www.sciviews.org/SciViews-K/index.html

The editor has a green bar that becomes red as soon as one edits a 
function, and that edit breaks the tests. This is tremendously useful.

Using Gmane search, the only mention I could find on svUnit was:
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.r.general/136632/focus=136662

I think this could make a great UseR 2009 talk. Ideally, by someone with 
more R experience than me, and even more ideally by Philippe Grosjean 
:), but it push comes to shove, I could prepare such a talk.

Would this be interesting at all? Are there any resources that I have 
missed? 

Jose Quesada wrote:

Hi,
I wonder what kind of interest there is on Test Driven Development 
(TDD) in R.

Test Driven Development consists of writing the test before the 
function, and iteratively build the function until it passes the test.

Python and Ruby (specially Ruby) have very strong test-oriented 
cultures. In fact, in Ruby at least the custom is to do TDD and 
lately Behavior-driven development (BDD). In BDD, one writes a story 
of what one would want the code to do. This story is almost native 
English, and then the test suite converts it into something that the 
language understand as tests.

There are some posts on the list about this, but they are about 
testing in general (Runit), not TDD. Example:
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.r.general/85047

Recently, I found there is an alpha, but working implementation of 
TDD for Komodo edit:
www.sciviews.org/SciViews-K/index.html

The editor has a green bar that becomes red as soon as one edits a 
function, and that edit breaks the tests. This is tremendously useful.

Using Gmane search, the only mention I could find on svUnit was:
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.r.general/136632/focus=136662

I think this could make a great UseR 2009 talk. Ideally, by someone 
with more R experience than me, and even more ideally by Philippe 
Grosjean :), but it push comes to shove, I could prepare such a talk.

Would this be interesting at all? Are there any resources that I have 
missed? 

There is the RUnit package which is a mature xUnit implementation for R.

I don't know of a tight integration into an editor (apart from
that it is _planned_ for StatET, the Eclipse R plug-in), but
as such it is very useful already.

http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/RUnit/index.html

HTH,
Tobias