In the previous post, we looked at how to easily automate R analysis, modeling, and development work for free using GitLab’s CI/CD. Together with the fantastic R-hub project, we can use GitLab CI/CD to do much more. In this post, we will take it to the next level by using R-hub to test our development work on many different platforms such as multiple Linux setups, MS Windows and MacOS.
Automating the execution, testing and deployment of R work is a very powerful tool to ensure the reproducibility, quality and overall robustness of the code that we are building, be it for data analysis and modeling purposes, developing R packages or even blogging. Modern tools also provide a free an easy to use way of achieving this goal. In this post, we will show a quick and simple way to automate R data analysis and package development checking, testing and installation with GitLab CI/CD and provide example files that can be used for testing packages and deploying blogdown-based websites.
A developer always pays his technical debts! And we have a debt to pay to the gods of coding best practices, as we did not present many unit tests for our functions yet. Today we will show how to efficiently investigate and improve unit test coverage for our R code, with focus on functions governing our RStudio addins, which have their own specifics. As a practical example, we will do a simple resctructuring of one of our functions to increase its test coverage from a mere 34% to over 90%.