I've been studying Unit Testing with Google Test in C++.
If the purpose of Unit Testing is to ensure certain segments or objects of the code are working the way they are supposed to, I would assume it's not necessary to compile and export the unit testing code with the final project, right? It's not like the user will be using it anyway. It just seems like it makes the project size unnecessarily larger.
My main question is: will all the Unit Testing code be compiled and exported with the final project or will I have to manually delete all the Unit Tests before exporting it?
Is there a best (or common) practice for Unit Testing and exporting projects?
If you're publishing a library, it's quite common to publish the unit tests. Imagine you're developing on Mac or Linux, for example, and someone wants to compile on Windows. Well, they should probably be able to run your tests to ensure they pass on a different environment. Or Android, or some microcontroller. Whatever.
Also, someone might decide to help you improve your project. They'll add a nifty-cool feature. It's nice if they can run your unit tests to make sure they don't break anything.
So yes, if you're publishing your project as source code, include the unit tests. If you're only publishing a compiled library, you can exclude them.
Any tests are used for maintaining source code.
When you do some changes in source code, the you should run test to verify that: new functionality is working properly and old functionality is didn't got broken.
If test tails this is signal for developer that something has to be fixed.
So if your application or library is shipped as exactable there is o point to ship tests. Why? When you have only executable you can't modify code, so no point to run tests.
If you are publishing a library as open source then you test should be published too.
If you are publishing your library only as executable, source code of test can be form of documentation. If test are written properly they will document how API can be used in every possible way and as since test are a code (formal language) this form of documentation can't be misinterpret.
Shipping tests as executable has no seance at all.
I recommend to watch Uncle Bob (Robert C. Martin) talks, in most of them he explains what are test for and why they are important.
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I have been developing an application in my free time using Qt.
As the size of code is increasing I am finding it difficult to contain new bugs for older code. I have been testing my application manually.
Since the target is an exe I cannot test it automated with C++ tests without injecting some extra code into my application.
So my question is, what is the best QA technique for a GUI application if you are a single developer & wont be earning money from the project as it will be released for free?
Thank You.
EDIT:
I would like to have a set of simple tests, each testing for specific functionalities of my software. I would like them to run automatically one after another. Finally they should create a report of which tests failed. This can possibly be done by creating new functions in the same classes + adding some checks in existing functions I want to test & then create a new class which will have all the tests. So I wanted to know whether is this the best way or is there a better alternative? Because everytime I will build a release target, I will be commenting/deleting this QA code, which may create some bugs for that build.
Currently I am not worried about documentation & comments as I have maintained that from the beginning. It is only about source code QA.
Unit tests by-the-book will only give you assurance for your methods, not for the entire application. But you can also use the same unit-test framework to write acceptance tests for specific capabilities of the application.
The easiest way to go would be to extract the GUI from the application, and to make the GUI dependent of an API/library. The API will make it easy to write functional tests. Be sure to make the GUI as thin as possible.
I wouldn't add test code to your class and remove it to release, I think this is as risky as shipping with the test code. You're better off have separated source as already advised here.
If your project is getting large enough, you'll probably want to create some unit tests for it (I like the free CppUnit library, which is similar to JUnit; also Jo Are By suggested QtTest, which presumably is available with Qt).
Even if you have to make some changes to your production code, it will be worth your time in the end.
You may also wish to look into automated GUI testing frameworks for Qt applications; I'm not familiar with any of these.
Test code go to its own source file.
You may split your exe into library and one main.cpp which simply call your library.
That way, you may use any unitTest Framework with extra test files to generate a executable which only tests your library.
For code testing you will use Junit testcase
You may split your exe into library and one main.cpp which simply call your library.
For GUI testing you have do it Manually because there is not Tool Available to Test GUI interface of any application.
In Manual testing GUI is check complete and GUI image or text is not displayed clearly or text is missing is not all this is will not be test by automation.
I am working on a project in where I decided to use unit tests. This was new to me but after researching I feel pretty confident I am doing it correctly creating mock objects and testing that the correct methods are called. This is working great but now I would like to actually run some tests that use the actual database and external components. How should I go about testing the actual execution of code? I do not want these tests to run when I run all tests. Is there a way to accomplish this using built in testing in vs2012?
Not that I'm aware of.
What you could do is create a separate project for your integration tests and then in the test explorer, separate your tests by class. Or some other logical seperation.
the current implementation that exists seems to specifically have unit testing mainly in mind, but that should change with 2013 and a stronger push towards TDD and Agile development.
Have a look here :http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms243147(v=vs.80).aspx
Scroll down to "Attributes for Identifying and Sorting Tests". There might be something there that's useful that you can use.
I can't work out how to get unit testing to work with Boost and Eclipse.
I get lots of different errors depending on where I put the source files.
Where are the tests supposed to go? (ie should I create a test folder in root, in src, no folder at all or what)
Do I need to specify something somewhere if I don't intend to have a main(), and just lots of tests?
I'm really confused, and I know I'm being quite lite on the details - hopefully you can show me the proper way to do Unit Testing with Boost in Eclipse rather than whatever I'm currently doing.
Compile your application in eclipse first normal without unit tests.
After that create a new Project and reference it to the former Project with your application.
Than you create a main.cpp and insert your unit tests there.
You should be able to use the other projects classes from the new Project. Therefore, you are able to Instantiate Objects and do your asserts or whatever you like. If you have any further questions, please post your actual error and provide a screen-shot of your current structure.
I've recently decided to start using some light unit testing to see if it adds any value to our project, but I'm having trouble finding documentation for SimplyVBUnit. Any suggestions?
There's some discussion of VB6 unit testing in this question, with Gutzofter's mini tutorial on SimplyVBUnit.
If you downloaded the binary installer for SimplyVBUnit it comes with a couple of example projects in the installation folder. Both the source code zip file and binary installer include a Help.chm showing many of the classes and how to apply them in your tests.
Have you considered collecting test coverage? This determines what part of your code has run, often as exercised by your unit tests. To do this, you need a test coverage data collection tool, as well as your tests.
EDIT: The only VB6 test coverage tool I know is http://www.aivosto.com/vbwatch.html
Aivisto seems to have a generally good reputation for thier VB tools.
I mainly develop in native C++ on Windows using Visual Studio.
A lot of times, I find myself creating a new function/class or whatever, and I just want to test that piece of logic I just wrote, quickly.
A lot of times, I have to run the entire application, which sometimes could take a while since there are many connected parts.
Is there some sort of tool that will allow me to test that new piece of code quickly without having to run the whole application?
i.e.
Say I have a project with about 1000 files, and I'm adding a new class called Adder. Adder has a method Add( int, int );
I just want the IDE/tool to allow me to test just the Adder class (without me having to create a new project and write a dummy main.cpp) by allowing me to specify the value of the inputs going into Adder object. Likewise, it would be nice if it would allow me to specify the expected output from the tested object.
What would be even cooler is if the IDE/tool would then "record" these sets of inputs/expected output, and automatically create unit tester class based on them. If I added more input/output sets, it would keep building a history of input/outputs.
Or how about this: what if I started the actual application, feed some real data to it, and have the IDE/tool capture the complete inputs going into the unit being tested. That way, I can quickly restart my testing if I found some bugs in my program or I want to change its interface a bit. I think this feature would be so neat, and can help developer quickly test / modify their code.
Am I talking about mock object / unit testing that already exists?
Sidenote: it would be cool if Visual Studio debugger has a "replay" technology where user can step back to find what went wrong. Such debugger already exists here: http://www.totalviewtech.com/
It's very easy to get started with static unit testing in C++ - three lines of code.
VS is a bit poor in that you have to go through wizards to make a project to build and run the tests, so if you have a thousand classes you'd need a thousand projects. So for large projects on VS I've tended to organised the project into a few DLLs for independent building and testing rather than monolithic ones.
An alternative to static tests more similar to your 'poke and dribble' script could be done in python, using swig to bind your code to the interpreter, and python's doc tests . I haven't used both together myself. Again, you'd need a separate target to build the python binding, and another to run the tests, rather than it being just a simple 'run this class' button.
I would go with Boost.Test (see tutorial here)).
The idea would be to add a new configuration to your project, which would exclude from build all unnecessary cpp files. You would just have to add .cpp files to describe the tests you want to pass.
I am no expert in this area but i have used this technique in the past and it works !
I think you are talking about unit testing and mock objects. Here are couple of C++ mock object libraries that might be useful :-
googlemock which only works with googletest
mockpp
You are essentially asking how can I test one function instead of the whole application. That is what unit-testing is, and you will find many questions about unit-testing C++ on SO.