rOpenSci’s second cohort of Champions has been onboarded!Their training first started with a session on code style, was followed by three sessions on the basics of R package development, and ended with a session on advanced R package development, which consisted of a potpourri of tips with discussion, followed by time for applying these principles to the participants’ packages.Here, I want to share one of the topics covered: Package testing, and

More and more R packages access resources on the web, and play crucial roles in workflows.Examples from the rOpenSci suite of packages include rromeo, GSODR, qualtRics, rnassqs, and many, many others.Like for all other packages, appropriate unit testing can make them more robust.However, unit testing of these packages can bring special challenges: dependence of tests on a good internet connection, testing in the absence of authentication

A new version of vcr was just released. See the release notes for all the details. I want to highlight a few of the more notable changes. New contributor vcr has a new author: Maëlle Salmon. She has been contributing to the package quite a lot lately, including many documentation improvements and big updates to the HTTP Testing in R which covers vcr in addition to some other packages.

This post describes a few different aspects behind the scenes of the development of dittodb which recently went through the rOpenSci peer review process and was released to CRAN on 24 July 2020.This isn’t an introduction to the package itself (that’s available on dittodb’s site), but rather a look behind the scenes of the conceiving of the idea, the inspiration for, some of the development of, and history behind dittodb.

Testing is a crucial component to any software package. Testing makes surethat your code does what you expect it to do; and importantly, makes it safer to makechanges moving forward because a good test suite will tell you if a change has brokenexisting functionality. Our recent community call on testing is a niceplace to get started with testing. One way to make testing even harder is through including HTTP requests.