have you and how do you do C++ autotest?

Question

As far as autotest is concerned, how do you do autotest for C++ programs? are there any autotest framework that can be utilized to do unit test and integration test?

Answer 1

The xUnit family can be used for unit tests. It exists for plain C++ code (CPPUNIT) and for .Net code (NUnit).

Answer 2

Boost have a test library you can have a look at among many others around.

Answer 3

You can use NUnit to achieve this, but there may be better ways. With NUnit you are writing test classes in managed C++/CLI which is calling your C++ code, which presumably runs as unmanaged. So for this option, some of your C++ code now runs as managed just for the sake of using NUnit. One may debate the "purity" of this approach. Another problem with this is attaching a debugger to NUnit (of course with both managed/native enabled) and trying to step through the managed C++/CLI bits in a sensible manner. Despite this, our office has been using NUnit for C++ unit and integration testing for a while now.

Just saw @Patrick's answer about CPPUnit, I will have to look at that.

Answer 4

Last time when I did some work in Qt, I've used Qt's QTestLib for unit tests. It did work well for my lo-fi needs. http://doc.qt.nokia.com/4.6/qtestlib-manual.html

Answer 5

Are you talking Autotest ala Ruby Autotest? If so, maybe Watchr would work for you. Yes, you would need to install the Ruby runtime on your development machine, but it looks like it can trigger pretty much anything that can be done on the command line when the file system changes. For example, if you wanted Watchr to build and run your C++ tests anytime a .c/.cpp/.h/.hpp file in your source tree changed you could do something like this:

watch('src/(.*)\.[h|cpp|hpp|c]') {system "build/buildAndRunTests.bat"}

This particular command obviously makes some assumptions about how your build process is set up (and obviously that you're on Windows), but that should be the gist of it. Our team configures our unit test projects with a post-build event that automatically runs the built unit test binary, so we can just trigger that part of our build process within the buildAndRunTests.bat script and have it print the results to the command-line. It might take some tweaking but it looks like Watchr may be a good choice. I'll update this response when I give it a shot (hopefully early next week).

UPDATE: I just tried this with one of my C# projects and got it working there. So I theoretically it should work with C++ projects as well.

autotest.watchr:

watch('./.*/.*\.cs$') {system "cd build && buildAndRunTests.bat && cd ..\\"}

Note the $ at the end of the regular expression. This is important because there are a lot of artifacts generated in the source tree at build time and if any of them match the string .cs it will trigger another run, effectively causing an infinite loop. Conceivably the same thing will happen if you generate/modify any source files at build time so you may have to find a way to compensate.

buildAndRunTests.bat:

pushd ..\
rem Build test project
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\devenv.com" Tests.Unit\Tests.Unit.csproj /rebuild Release
popd

rem Navigate to the directory containing the built files
pushd ..\Tests.Unit\bin\Release
rem Run the tests through nunit-console
..\..\..\Dependencies\NUnit-2.5.5-bin\net-2.0\nunit-console.exe Tests.Unit.dll /run=Tests.Unit
popd

Then, in a seperate console window just navigate to your project directory and run the following command (assumes autotest.watchr is at the top of your project tree, see below):

watchr autotest.watchr

Now, when any .cs files change in the source tree it will run the buildAndRunTests.bat script automatically. This is just an example from my local machine so it likely won't work verbatim on yours, but you should be able to tweak it to your needs.

This is the directory structure for reference:

/Project
  /build
    buildAndRunTests.bat
  /Tests.Unit
  /Dependencies
    /NUnit-2.5.5-bin
      /net-2.0
        nunit-console.exe
  autotest.watchr

I hope this helps.