I'm starting yet another project, and this one is about unit-testing. Here are some of my ideas. It is in the CVS in /abstractions/pureunity/

------------------8<--------cut-here--------8<------------------ PureUnity

Copyright 2006 by Mathieu Bouchard <matju à artengine point ca>

$Id: README,v 1.2 2005/12/29 18:47:56 matju Exp $

+-+-+--+---+-----+--------+-------------+---------------------+ GOALS

1. To provide a unit-test framework, which also provide benchmarking features, all made in Pd for use in Pd.

2. To provide tests for functionality in internals, externals, abstractions, etc., in a modularized way, in a DRY/OAOO fashion, thus abstracting out common features so that many objects share the same test patch for the features that they have in common.

+-+-+--+---+-----+--------+-------------+---------------------+ TEST PROTOCOL

new: create common (reusable) fixtures.

inlet 0: bang: run all available tests in that class. individual tests don't have to be available through individual methods but may. If they do, the names of the methods must match those given in the test results.

each test should build its own non-reusable fixtures and reinitialize common fixtures, not assuming that the previous tests have left the common fixtures in a normal state.

outlet 0: test results. a sequence of lists like: list $name $passed? $accuracy $elapsed for example: list

where: $name is a symbol $passed? is either 0 for failure or 1 for success $accuracy is a float proportional to relative error on math (if not applicable, use 0) $elapsed is a float, the time elapsed in milliseconds or it is the symbol "-" if not measured.

+-+-+--+---+-----+--------+-------------+---------------------+ SEVERITIES (in decreasing order)

* crash: Segmentation Fault, Bus Error, Illegal Instruction, Infinite Loop, etc. You can't deal with those errors at the level of the tests. Maybe there should be a way to tell a test object to skip certain tests, by name, in order to be able to perform as many tests as possible while waiting for a fix. It could become possible to rescue from some of those crashes if Pd supported exceptions (stack-unwinding).

* corruption: this may cause future crashes and failures on innocent objects/features. I have no solution for this except to be careful.

* post(),error(),pd_error(): Gets printed in the console. The problem is that those can't be handled by the test objects, so someone has to read them and interpret them. Also they prevent test objects to ensure that error conditions produce error messages.

* pd_error2(): I wish this would exist. It would be sort of like pd_error() but it would produce a pd message instead, whose selector would be an error code, designed to be both localizable and [route]able. By default, that message would be sent to the console, but there would be an internal class designed to catch those messages. (If stack-unwinding were possible, it would be disabled by default on pd_error2 and could be enabled explicitly by-selector).

* failure: a test object reports a problem through outlet 0.