Unit Testing Frameworks in SAS: FUTS vs. SASUnit

Question

Dear Stackoverflow,

Does anyone have experience using a third-party unit testing framework for SAS such as FUTS (http://www.thotwave.com/products/futs.jsp) or SASUnit (http://www.redscope.org/sasunit/en)?

I'd really like to compare and contrast these options with each other and with any other known alternatives (I currently use my own home-brewed unit test %assert macros, but I'd like to switch to something more robust). Possible areas to consider include:

• What size of user base do these frameworks have?
• Are they well supported by the developer?
• Are there known bugs?
• Are there usability issues?

Most of what I find in internet searches on these products are generally product release announcements by the developers themselves (there are also white papers written by the developers on both of these frameworks). However, I don't see much evidence of a user community actively using these products, which makes me nervous to start using them myself.

Answer 1

Neither are widely used in my experience. I constantly run into situations where analysts and programmers write their own testing work arounds.

Answer 2

On the SCL side of SAS, SCLUnit is pretty much a direct port of JUnit to SAS Component Language. My former boss and I developed it, and I use it regularly to test classes and methods for my SAS application.

http://www.sascommunity.org/wiki/SclUnit

If you are interested in delving into SCL and object-oriented programming, SCLUnit gives a way to structure unit tests that will be familiar to anyone who has used JUnit or other xUnit frameworks.