I've been using MSTest so far for my unit-tests, and found that it would sometimes randomly break my builds for no reason. The builds would fail in VS but compile fine in MSBuild - with error like 'option strict does not allow IFoo to cast to type IFoo'. I believe I have finally fixed it, but after the bug coming back and struggling to make it go away again, and little help from MS, it left a bad taste in my mouth. I also noticed when looking at this forum and other blogs and such, that most people are using NUnit, xUnit, or MBUnit.. We are on VS2008 at work BTW.. So now I am looking to explore other options..
I'm working on moving our team to start doing TDD and real unit testing and have some training planned, but first would like to come up with a set of standard tools & best practices. To this end I've been looking online to come up with the right infrastructure for both a build server and dev machines...I was looking at the typemock website as I've heard great things about their mocking framework, and noticed that it seems like they promote MSTest, and even have some links of people moving TO MSTest from NUnit..
This is making me re-think my decision.. so I guess I'm asking - is anyone using MSTest as part of their TDD infrastructure? Any known limitiations it has, if I want to integrate with a build / CI server, or code coverage or any other kind of TDD tool I may need? I did search these forums and mostly find people comparing the 3rd party frameworks to eachother and not even giving MSTest much of a chance... Is there a good reason why.. ?
Thanks for the advice
EDIT: Thanks to the replies in this thread, I've confirmed MSTest works for my purposes and integreated gracefully with CI tools and build servers.
But does anyone have any experience with FinalBuilder?? This is the tool that I'd like us to use for the build scripts to prevent having to write a ton of XML compared to other build tools. Any limitiations here that I should be aware of before committing to MS Test?
I should also note - we are using VSS =(. I'm hoping we can ax this soon - hopefully as part of, maybe even the first step, of setting up all of this infrastructure.
At Safewhere we currently use MSTest for TDD, and it works out okay.
Personally, I love the IDE integration, but dislike the API. If it ever becomes possible to integrate xUnit.NET with the VS test runner, we will migrate very soon thereafter.
At least with TFS, MSTest works pretty well as part of our CI.
All in all I find that MSTest works adequately for me, but I don't cling to it.
If you are evaluating mock libraries, take a look at this comparison.
I've been using MS Test since VS 2008 came out, but I haven't managed to strong-arm anything like TDD or CI here at work, although I've messed with Cruise Control a little in an attempt to build a CI server on my local box.
In general I've found MS Test to be pretty decent for testing locally, but there are some pain points for institutional use.
First, MS Test adds quite a few things that probably don't belong in source control. The .VSMDI files are particularly annoying; just running MS Test creates anywhere from 1 to 5 of them and adds them to the solution file. Which means churn on your .SLN in source control, and churn of that sort is bad.
I understand the supposed point behind these extra files -- tracking test run history and such -- but I don't find them particularly useful for anything but a single developer. You should use your build service and CI for that sort of thing!
Second, you either must have Team Foundation Server to run your unit tests as part of CI, or you have to have a copy of Visual Studio installed on your build server if you use, for example, Cruise Control.NET. See this Stack Overflow question for details.
In general, there's nothing wrong with MS Test. But going CI will not be as smooth as it could be.
I have been using MSTest very successfully in our company. We are currently setting up standardised build processes within our company and so far, we have had good success with TeamCity. For Continuous integration, we use out the box TeamCity configurations. For the actual release builds, we set up large msbuild scripts that automate the entire process.
I really like mstest because of the IDE integration and also that all our devs automatically can use it without installing any 3rd party dependencies. I would not recommend switching just because of the problem you are experiencing. I have come full circle, where we went over to nunit and then came back again. These frameworks are all the same at the end of the day so pick the one that is easiest for most your devs to get access to and start using.
What I suspect your problem might be... sounds like an obscure problem I have had before where incorrect references of dll's (eg: adding explicit references (via browse) to projects in your solution, and not using the project reference) leads to out-of-date problems that only come up after clean checkouts or builds.
The other really suspect issue that I have found before is if you have some visual component or control that has a public property of some custom type that is being serialised in the forms .resx file. I typically need to flag them with an attribute that says SerializationVisibility.Hidden. This means that the IDE will not try to generate setters for the property value (which is typically some object graph). Just a thought. Could be way out.
I trust the tools and they don't really lie about there being a genuine problem. They only misrepresent them or report them as something completely obscure. It sounds to me like you have this. I suspect this because the error message doesn't make sense if all is in order, but it does make sense if some piece of code has loaded up an out of date or modified version of the dll at that point.
I have successfully deployed several FinalBuilder installations and the customers have been very happy with the outcome. I can highly recommend it.
Related
I'm currently using jenkins/hudson for continuous integration a large mostly C++ project. We have separate projects for trunk and every branch. Also, there are some related projects for the Java code, but the setup for those are fairly basic right now (we may do more later though). The C++ projects do the following:
Builds everything with options for whether to reconfigure, do a clean build, or use a fresh checkout
Optionally builds and runs all tests
Optionally runs all tests using Valgrind's memcheck
Runs cppcheck
Generates doxygen documentation
Publishes reports: unit tests, valgrind, cppcheck, compiler warnings, SLOC, open tasks, and code coverage (using gcov, gcovr, and the cobertura plugin)
Deploys code nightly or on demand to a test environment and a package repository
Everything is configurable for automatic builds and optional for on demand builds. Underneath, there's a bash script that controls much of this, which farther depends on our build system, which uses automake and autoconf along with custom bash scripts.
We started using Hudson (at the time) because that's what the Java guys were using and we just wanted nightly builds. Since then, we've added a lot more and continue to add more. In some ways Hudson is great, but certainly isn't ideal.
I've looked at other solutions and the only one that looks like it could be a replacement is buildbot. Would buildbot be better for this situation? Is the investment worth it since we're already using Hudson? Why?
EDIT: Someone asked why I haven't found Hudson/Jenkins to be ideal. The short answer is that everything can be improved. I'm simply wondering if Jenkins is the best current solution for my use case or whether there is something better (buildbot?) that would be easier to maintain in the long run even as new requirements come up.
Both are open source projects, but you do not need to change buildbot code to "extend" it, it is actually quite easy to import your own packages in its configuration in which you can sub-class most of the features with your own additions. Examples: your own compilation or test code, some parsing of outputs/errors to be given to the next steps, your own formating of alert emails etc. there are lots of possibilities.
Generally I would say that buildbot is the most "general purpose" automatic builds tools. Jenkins however might be the best related to running tests, especially for parsing and presenting results in nice ways (results, details, charts.. some clicks away), things that buildbot does not do "out-of-the-box". I'm actually thinking of using both to have sexier test result pages.. :-)
Also as a rule of thumb it should not be difficult to create a new tool's config: if the specification of what to do (configs, builds, tests) is too hard to switch from one tool to another, it is a (bad) sign that not enough configuration scripts are moved to the sources. Buildbot (or Jenkins) should only call simple commands. If it is simple to run tests, then developers will do it as well and this will improve the success rate, whereas if only the continuous integration system runs the tests, you will be running after it to fix the new code failures, and will loose its non-regression value, just my 0.02€ :-)
Hope it'll help.
The 'result integration' is also in jenkins/hudson, and you can relatively easily capture build products without having to 'copy them elsewhere'.
For our instance, the coverage reports and unit test metrics and javadoc for the java code is all integrated. For our C++ code, the plugins are a little lacking, but you can still get most of it.
we ran buildbot since pre 0.7, and are now running 0.8 and are only now seeing any real reason to switch, as buildbot 0.8 forgot about windows slaves for an extended period of time and the support was pretty poor.
There are many other solutions out there, besides Jenkins/Hudson/BuildBot:
TeamCity by Jetbrains
Bamboo by Atlassian
Go by Thoughtworks
Cruise Control
OpenMake Meister
The specifics about what you are doing are not so important, in fact, as long as the agents (aka nodes) that you are doing them on support those tasks.
The beauty of a CI server is noticing when the build changes to trigger a new build (and test), publish the artifacts, and publish test results.
When you compare CI tools like those we mentioned, consider features like the usability of its interface, how easy is branching (and features it might offer like automatic merging), notifications (like XMPP/jabber), or an information-radiator (like hooking up a monitor to always show status). Product support is another thing to consider - Jenkins' support is only as good as who is responding to community questions at the time you have questions.
My personal favorite is Bamboo, but it comes with a license fee.
I'm a long-time Jenkins user in the middle of evaluating Buildbot and would like to offer a few items for folks considering using Buildbot for multi-module solutions:
*) Buildbot doesn't have any out-of-the-box concept of file artifacts related to each build. It's not in the UI and it's not in any of the builtin "steps" modules as far as I can see:
http://docs.buildbot.net/current/manual/configuration/buildsteps.html
...and I see no third party plugin:
https://github.com/buildbot/buildbot/wiki/PluginList#steps
Buildbot does collect all the console output from a given build, but critically, you can't collect files related to it.
*) Given that artifacts are not supported, it's not easy to create "collector" projects that bring multiple modules into say, a single installer. Jenkins has a great feature that lets you parameterize a build with builds from other modules (the parameter type is a run).
*) Establishing dependencies between modules is trickier in Buildbot. Say you have a library that three binaries depend on, and you want those binaries to rebuild each time the library changes. Jenkins has triggers built into the UI. If you want to do triggers in Buildbot you have to script them using schedulers.Dependent, and it causes a lot of item congestion in the Schedulers UI.
*) When you're working in Buildbot, it seems that pretty much all of the configuration is done in master.cfg in code. This is awesome and frustrating.
*) Buildbot forces you to create a worker in addition to a master server. This is annoying for beginners and systems for which a single build server is sufficient.
My impression after two days of Buildbot evaluation is that we'll stick with Jenkins, primarily due to it having artifacts. Buildbot is a tool we'd only use if we had more extensive customization needs, and the time to do it.
On the subject of buildbot and artifacts -- I don't have enough user score to make a comment -- you can get artifacts from buildbot 2.x series pretty easy with built-in file/directory upload actions. However you rarely want to just move files. Typically you make a triggered buildstep that does deployment directly off the worker for best results. eg push to cloud storage, containers, thirdparty (steam uploads), etc.
This way you can get metrics on the uploads and conditionally control them better (or even mix and match artifacts across worker machines).
In one of my Django projects I have a suite of unit tests that are based on TransactionalTestCase class (it takes much longer than TestCase). It is impossible to run tests after each change in code because it takes more than 0.5 hour to run all tests. We looked some time ago for some easy contiuous integration tool that could allow us to (at least) run tests on tests server and send emails with errors to the team members (we have of course code repository and we don't need auto deployment at the momment). Do you have some working solutions or ideas how to accomplish this?
We wrote some 'super extra simple CI server' which does nothing more than running tests and sending email reports (it is integrated with our code repository). But since we had some problems with our not-ideal simple tool recently I'm wondering now if you have sucessfully completed similar scenarios in your working enviroment?
I'm looking for something ligthweight, easy to install and use.
Disclaimer: I don't know Django. But I do know that I use Hudson as my continuous integration tool for a number of languages and platforms. I found it easy to install and confgure on both Windows and Linux (set & forget) and was impressed with the number of plugins available.
Basically, if what you want to do can be automated by a sctript file, then you can use Hudson. It really is worth checking out.
It took me only a few minutes to set it so that I get an email if, and only if, something goes wrong, although you might want to do somethinng else (for which there probably exists a plugin). Hudson also plays well with other tools like BigZilla, all major version control tools, etc
Have you considered having two kinds of tests - basic and advanced and adding additional django command, that would run only basic tests, that are fast? This way you can do basic testing on small changes and run the full test suite only when you are about to commit/push changes?
I've heard more than one person say that if your build process is clicking the build button, than your build process is broken. Frequently this is accompanied with advice to use things like make, cmake, nmake, MSBuild, etc. What exactly do these tools offer that justifies manually maintaining a separate configuration file?
EDIT: I'm most interested in answers that would apply to a single developer working on a ~20k line C++ project, but I'm interested in the general case as well.
EDIT2: It doesn't look like there's one good answer to this question, so I've gone ahead and made it CW. In response to those talking about Continuous Integration, yes, I understand completely when you have many developers on a project having CI is nice. However, that's an advantage of CI, not of maintaining separate build scripts. They are orthogonal: For example, Team Foundation Build is a CI solution that uses Visual Studio's project files as it's configuration.
Aside from continuous integration needs which everyone else has already addressed, you may also simply want to automate some other aspects of your build process. Maybe it's something as simple as incrementing a version number on a production build, or running your unit tests, or resetting and verifying your test environment, or running FxCop or a custom script that automates a code review for corporate standards compliance. A build script is just a way to automate something in addition to your simple code compile. However, most of these sorts of things can also be accomplished via pre-compile/post-compile actions that nearly every modern IDE allows you to set up.
Truthfully, unless you have lots of developers committing to your source control system, or have lots of systems or applications relying on shared libraries and need to do CI, using a build script is probably overkill compared to simpler alternatives. But if you are in one of those aforementioned situations, a dedicated build server that pulls from source control and does automated builds should be an essential part of your team's arsenal, and the easiest way to set one up is to use make, MSBuild, Ant, etc.
One reason for using a build system that I'm surprised nobody else has mentioned is flexibility. In the past, I also used my IDE's built-in build system to compile my code. I ran into a big problem, however, when the IDE I was using was discontinued. My ability to compile my code was tied to my IDE, so I was forced to re-do my entire build system. The second time around, though, I didn't make the same mistake. I implemented my build system via makefiles so that I could switch compilers and IDEs at will without needing to re-implement the build system yet again.
I encountered a similar problem at work. We had an in-house utility that was built as a Visual Studio project. It's a fairly simple utility and hasn't needed updating for years, but we recently found a rare bug that needed fixing. To our dismay, we found out that the utility was built using a version of Visual Studio that was 5-6 versions older than what we currently have. The new VS wouldn't read the old-version project file correctly, and we had to re-create the project from scratch. Even though we were still using the same IDE, version differences broke our build system.
When you use a separate build system, you are completely in control of it. Changing IDEs or versions of IDEs won't break anything. If your build system is based on an open-source tool like make, you also don't have to worry about your build tools being discontinued or abandoned because you can always re-build them from source (plus fix bugs) if needed. Relying on your IDE's build system introduces a single point of failure (especially on platforms like Visual Studio that also integrate the compiler), and in my mind that's been enough of a reason for me to separate my build system and IDE.
On a more philosophical level, I'm a firm believer that it's not a good thing to automate away something that you don't understand. It's good to use automation to make yourself more productive, but only if you have a firm understanding of what's going on under the hood (so that you're not stuck when the automation breaks, if for no other reason). I used my IDE's built-in build system when I first started programming because it was easy and automatic. I later started to become more aware that I didn't really understand what was happening when I clicked the "compile" button. I did a little reading and started to put together a simple build script from scratch, comparing my output to that of the IDE's build system. After a while I realized that I now had the power to do all sorts of things that were difficult or impossible through the IDE. Customizing the compiler's command-line options beyond what the IDE provided, I was able to produce a smaller, slightly faster output. More importantly, I became a better programmer by having real knowledge of the entire development process from writing code all the way down through the generation of machine language. Understanding and controlling the entire end-to-end process allows me to optimize and customize all of it to the needs of whatever project I'm currently working on.
If you have a hands-off, continuous integration build process it's going to be driven by an Ant or make-style script. Your CI process will check the code out of version control when changes are detected onto a separate build machine, compile, test, package, deploy, and create a summary report.
Let's say you have 5 people working on the same set of code. Each of of those 5 people are making updates to the same set of files. Now you may click the build button and you know that you're code works, but what about when you integrate it with everyone else. The only you'll know is that if you get everyone else's and try. This is easy every once in a while, but it quickly becomes tiresome to do this over and over again.
With a build server that does it automatically, it checks if the code compiles for everyone all the time. Everyone always knows if the something is wrong with the build, and what the problem is, and no one has to do any work to figure it out. Small things add up, it may take a couple of minutes to pull down the latest code and try and compile it, but doing that 10-20 times a day quickly becomes a waste of time, especially if you have multiple people doing it. Sure you can get by without it, but it is so much easier to let an automated process do the same thing over and over again, then having a real person do it.
Here's another cool thing too. Our process is setup to test all the sql scripts as well. Can't do that with pressing the build button. It reloads snapshots of all the databases it needs to apply patches to and runs them to make sure that they all work, and run in the order they are supposed to. The build server is also smart enough to run all the unit tests/automation tests and return the results. Making sure it can compile is fine, but with an automation server, it can handle many many steps automatically that would take a person maybe an hour to do.
Taking this a step further, if you have an automated deployment process along with the build server, the deployment is automatic. Anyone who can press a button to run the process and deploy can move code to qa or production. This means that a programmer doesn't have to spend time doing it manually, which is error prone. When we didn't have the process, it was always a crap shoot as to whether or not everything would be installed correctly, and generally it was a network admin or a programmer who had to do it, because they had to know how to configure IIS and move the files. Now even our most junior qa person can refresh the server, because all they need to know is what button to push.
the IDE build systems I've used are all usable from things like Automated Build / CI tools so there is no need to have a separate build script as such.
However on top of that build system you need to automate testing, versioning, source control tagging, and deployment (and anything else you need to release your product).
So you create scripts that extend your IDE build and do the extras.
One practical reason why IDE-managed build descriptions are not always ideal has to do with version control and the need to integrate with changes made by other developers (ie. merge).
If your IDE uses a single flat file, it can be very hard (if not impossible) to merge two project files into one. It may be using a text-based format, like XML, but XML it notoriously hard with standard diff/merge tools. Just the fact that people are using a GUI to make edits makes it more likely that you end up with unnecessary changes in the project files.
With distributed, smaller build scripts (CMake files, Makefiles, etc.), it can be easier to reconcile changes to project structure just like you would merge two source files. Some people prefer IDE project generation (using CMake, for example) for this reason, even if everyone is working with the same tools on the same platform.
We are thinking about moving our tests from MSTest to XUnit.
Is there any migration application that takes a MSTest and migrates it to XUnit?
Also, if not, what should I look out for when doing this?
Thanks.
JD.
I moved quite a few tests recently. It depends on how many and what type of tests you're converting, and you didnt kill yourself giving us details. In general, I think its safe to assume that your average MSTest minded shop wont be massively Test Infected and thus wont have delved into each dark corner of MSTest.
All the Assert.* methods and the basic Test Attributes are simple find and replaces. The more rare ones, I'd generally steer towards assessing each case individually. Unless you're already a xUnit.net expert, you've got lots to learn and this will help you.
Also, usage of Assert.Fail isnt a simple transformation. The other thing is the transformation of TestClassInitialize to IUseFixture - simple to do, but hard to automate.
If people are using Test References, you won't be able to remove the reference to the MSTest assembly (and you'll still need to have VS on your build server - and it will continue to randomly fail on the Shadow taks, see my questions).
The biggest manual work for me was going through the 20 lines of boilerplate in a region at the top to see whether anyone actually used any of the custom attributes before deleting them.
The main thing that would have been a lot of work had it not been for a CodeRush template was converting ExpectedException to Assert.Throws. If you havent got CodeRush or ReSharper on this job, you'd be stealing money from your employer.
Consider Compare MSTest and xUnit
I've spent 4 years developing C++ using Visual Studio 2008 for a commercial company; it's now time for me to upgrade my development process.
Here's the problem: I dont have a 1 button build automation. I also dont have a CI server that automatically builds when a commit happens, and emails me whether a build is broken or not. Worse we dont even have a single unit test!!
Can someone please point to me how I can get started?
I have looked at many many tools and I think I might go with:
Visual Build (for build automation) (Note: I also considered Final Builder)
Cruise (for CI server)
I also now am just starting to practice TDD...so I will want to automate my unit tests as well. I chose Google Test/Mock for their extensive documentation. (Cant go wrong with Google brand can I? =p)
Price is not the issue, I want what's best and easiest to get started.
Can people that use real CI/automation tool for unmanaged MSVC++ tell me their tools and how I can go about starting?
Our source control is Subversion.
Last point: I'm also considering project management/tracking tool that integrates right into VSTD ..and thinking about using OnTime. VSTS costs too much. I tried FogBugz, but I think it's too simple. Any others?
I would take some time to seriously consider TeamCity. We used CruiseControl.NET for a while and TeamCity completely demolishes it. Plus it has built-in plugins for Boost and CppUnit, so your unit testing will come for free.
Best of all, the tool is free for < 20 users and gives you three build agents.
I just finished implementing our C++ product at work and it was fairly simple. We did it with msbuild and basically use the msbuild task to compile the solution. Other targets can be used to copy files, run unit tests, etc.
The last time I worked on an unmanaged MSVC++ project (which was moderately sized I might add), we used FinalBuilder to do the automated build & versioning (and even executing PCLint and other profiling tools as well).
Having said that, if you're willing to invest the time, MSBuild (or nAnt perhaps?) can do everything you need - even for unmanaged solutions.
Which brings us to the trade-off: Tools like Visual Build Pro and Final Builder get you up and running quickly. If you want something which offers a greater range of customization, you'll probably be spending a decent amount of time learning and understanding it - i.e. MSBuild, CIFactory, nAnt etc are no cake walk.
So if price isn't an issue - is time an issue? If time is at a premium, I'd investigate the GUI driven tools, they'll get you to where you want to go quickly. If you know you're going to need to extend on the simple one button build + unit tests + deploy scenario (which happens a lot!) then decide if you can invest the time into the more complex tools like MSBuild?
We use a combination of Boost.Build, NAnt, CPPUnit and either Cruise Control.NET or Hudson (we've used them both for various projects but are starting to prefer Hudson).
They are all good tools though we're considering replacing CPPUnit - the Google unit test system is pretty good from what I've seen.
If you're happy running on just Windows you can lose Boost.Build and just call out to Visual Studio from NAnt.
As for issue tracking/project management we settled on Vision Project after a long investigation. It's not well known (yet) but we've found it a very good fit in our environment. Fogbugz is great, a nice, clear interface but we came to the conclusion you did too; way too simple for our needs.
Although the .NET world is spoilt for these kinds of tools Continuous Integration is still pretty easy to set up for C++! I wouldn't think of starting a non-trivial project without putting these systems in place.
we use subversion + cruisecontrol + wix to accomplich CI automated builds outputting one-click installers. this combo has worked very well for us. we've created out own site for admin of svn user groups and permissioning and added the web interface to cc to it. we have a sql server storing all the collected stats from svn and cc and use them for custom reports available on our site. we are looking to add other tools to the mix for checking various attributes of the code stored in svn. this combo has worked very well for us.
At my company we use CruiseControl (http://cruisecontrol.sourceforge.net/). The Java version, not .NET, to build our wxWidgets application on Windows and OS X. Working great for us so far.