Re: Unit testing IOCs and databases

["Johnson, Andrew N. via Tech-talk" <tech-talk at aps.anl.gov>]

Hi Tom,

On Sep 7, 2021, at 6:19 AM, Stainer Tom via Tech-talk <tech-talk at aps.anl.gov> wrote:

With regard to base tests, I have indeed tried writing unit tests with the epicsUnitTest.h but one quirk I could not understand is why I have to count up all the asserts and add that number to the testPlan as an argument.

Do people run a script to count them or do you simply run it once to fail and then use that number?

It wasn’t a big issue, it is just a bit more overhead compared to other testing libraries.

This is covered in the documentation/Doxygen annotation comments.

Providing the test count is optional, but it’s there so the harness can detect if the test program crashes before it has completed all of the tests. During test program development you can call testPlan(0) at the start and everything will work just fine, but we recommend that you fill in the count once you’ve finished adding tests or you can miss out on the check that it did actually run all of them. This also encourages you to ensure that every test reports a single pass or fail result

An old parser for the TAP format for the Jenkins CI software didn’t originally check the count at all, and we had several occasions where a test seg-faulted on one architecture but the job passed because the parser didn’t realize there was a problem. 

HTH,

- Andrew

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Complexity comes for free, simplicity you have to work for.