Exploring the C++ Unit Testing Framework Jungle

Exploring the C++ Unit Testing Framework Jungle over on Games from Within is a really good look at all of the C++ unit testing frameworks out there. It compares the following frameworks: * CppUnit * Boost.Test * CppUnitLite * NanoCppUnit…

Test driven development of distributed systems

Years of work on various large-scale software systems made me realize a few simple things:   Software testing is hard. Great advances in Test Driven Development made testing more productive. Still, to achieve full test coverage for a system,…

2005-05-16 links

2005-05-16 links

* Games from Within: Exploring the C++ Unit Testing Framework Jungle

* SCons: A software construction tool

Taken from Jim’s del.icio.us links

Feet Up!

Comparing C++ unit testing frameworks

If you’re shopping around for a C++ unit test framework, make sure to check out this analysis of C++ unit test frameworks. It’s a good idea to pay attention to the conclusions made by the author of such a…

Great review. I did spent some time comparing unit test frameworks and asking people for something simple.

For now i’m using TUT http://tut-framework.sourceforge.net . Its favourite feature for me – fixtures. Once you wrote struct containing data setup(ctor) and teardown(dtor) for test it gets constructed and destructed for each test in a group. And fixture members are referenced implicitly through “this” pointer. I choosed it over a boost because i dont like libraries that need to be built in some special way only. Major drawback of TUT is in its compiler requirements – i just cant use it in the old project built by MSVC6.

Test Driven Development

I also find book reviews by people who actually do a lot of programming very useful. Sometimes it’s really hard to find books that don’t talk about the basics for half the book. So I’m really happy to see your reviews, keep it up

BTW, would you mind mentioning what MT plugin you are using for the currently reading section? I’m new to the MT world.

Thanks

GUI applications are the most difficult kind to do with TDD (and, to a certain extent, the ones you get least amount of benefit from, especially if they don’t have much real “logic” inside).

Some resources for TDD with GUIs are the Yahoo mailing list (very little traffic) http://groups.yahoo.com/group/TestFirstUserInterfaces/, and Phlip’s book (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0321227328), which should be available in a few months.

The main problem with GUI apps is that you often end up having to twist the framework around to be able to do TDD comfortably.

Games on the other hand, are *not* mostly GUIs. There’s a layer that deals with rendering graphics or creating sound, but most of it is the game logic inside, which can easily be done in a TDD way (especially for anything below game scripts, I’m not convinced that TDD is the right way to go for really high level gameplay code which is changing all the time and nothing depends on it).

More about all this soon. Very soon

http://arrizza.com/unittesters/jutasserter/jutasserter.html

for a very simple unittester

# Small:

* UtAsserter.h: 55 lines

* UtAsserter.cpp: 343 lines

* main.cpp: 2 lines

# Simple:

* Test cases are created by declaring them: TEST(x)

* main() requires only one line TestSuite::Run()

# don’t have to maintain the test suite, done automatically

# easy to add more assert types

# format works with MSVCs next_error (F4)

# works with VC6 & VC7; partially works with g++