Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Torsten Bögershausen via Tech-talk <tech-talk at aps.anl.gov> · Tue, 7 Sep 2021 11:07:19 +0000

Hej Tom,
some answers inline

From: Tech-talk <tech-talk-bounces at aps.anl.gov> on behalf of Stainer Tom via Tech-talk <tech-talk at aps.anl.gov>
Reply-To: Stainer Tom <Tom.Stainer at sckcen.be>
Date: Tuesday, 7 September 2021 at 11:13
To: "tech-talk at aps.anl.gov" <tech-talk at aps.anl.gov>
Subject: Unit testing IOCs and databases

Hello EPICS community,

I have a question, that is quite broad in its nature (I know these don’t go down well here but thought I’d try anyway), regarding testing in EPICS.

Specifically I am interested in how people using EPICS generally test their applications and the logic in IOCs, at a unit testing level. 
I am not talking about testing epics-base, of course I trust that your tests provide good coverage ☺. What I am interested in is how can I test logic that is in an IOC (db file or via smart database).

Essentially this boils down to 4 main questions:

- Given a db file what is the standard way to test logic and records inside it in an automated fashion?
Not what I am aware of - the "standard way". Each record has it's own specific behaviour....

- Using the V4 smart database, what is the standard way to mock the protocol i.e. PVA, to do more unit testing rather than integration testing? 
- How do people mock hardware? Is this done by using the asynPortDriver interface?
I am doing tests using both simulated and real hardware: Motion controllers and motors.
Some tests need the simulator to simulate failures in HW...
In any sense, there is a common motor driver, a model 3 driver.
The simulator does the same things as the real HW, so we use the same driver in both cases. 

- Has anyone tried using other libraries, such as google test, Catch2, doctest,… to do unit testing in EPICS? If so, how can I set this up with the EPICS build system?
I am using pytest. 
And the whole test-suite is rather a integration test, not a Unit test.
If you, or anybody else, is interested, I can explain & show stuff in a video meeting.

Kind regards,
Tom

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System