[TIP] General purpose testing frameworks

Robert Collins robertc at robertcollins.net
Mon Dec 21 03:10:38 PST 2009


On Mon, 2009-12-21 at 13:09 +0530, Noufal Ibrahim wrote:
> Hello everyone, 


>    II've been doing some googling and have found subunit which can, as
> far as I can tell, decouple the test results from the harness. If I
> can convert my tests to use this, I can write a single harness to
> interpret the subunit results and produce a report. It's a 'component'
> rather than a full fledged test harness though. 

If you hadn't mentioned it, I would have suggested subunit - that
decoupling is precisely what it is intended to support. While it is cast
in a 'unit test' sense, there isn't anything intrinsically unit-test
about it: it can represent pretty much any test, and with 0.0.4's
mime-type attachment support, binary data (such as a failing ROM) if
needed.

>    I've also found pandokia which is interesting and I'm trying it out
> right now. 

One thing you could do fairly trivially is glue subunit and pandokia
together with a subunit2pandokia filter, though you could also write
tools to generate pandokia output directly. Subunit's C / C++ / shell &
TAP bindings may be of assistance to your low level test developers
though, whereas you'd need to write custom core for pandokia regardless.

>    The requirement though seems quite natural and I get the feeling
> that there's something obvious that I'm overlooking. Most of the
> searches I do give me tools that are specific to 'unit testing' python
> applications which is not what I'm trying to do. 

I wouldn't get too mislead by terminology. The main difference between
unit and other test suites is in the execution, which you'll be
substituting with your custom tests regardless.

Cheers,
Rob
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