Testing and POLE Dancing

Pressing on with deploying POLE I am starting to look at Unit testing. The idea is to be able to test the new iterator before deploying it. Ideas like this are nothing new in the programing world - but coming from a project that is old, a little out of control and never had any unit testing it is good to deploy a little rigor. What I am hoping to gain from this is to eliminate unknowns and upfront and remove some of the uncertainties with POLE.

XCode comes with two built in unit test frameworks CPlusTest for C & C++, and OCUnit for Objective-C. There are other unit test frameworks around, and I note a particularly good post in Dave Dribin's Blog. I have elected to go with the CPlusTest despite Dave Dribin's reservations - the integration with XCode is good and I also plan use OCUnit when I come to start work on the UI.

CPlusTest is horribly easy to use - you set up a new target in your XCode project just choose Unit test Bundle from the list of possible targets, and then choose the C++ Test Case when you add a new file. XCode drops in a stub class to fill in. You have to register our test cases in the file - it is basic boiler plate stuff and Apple's documentation is quite clear. I only mention these steps to give an idea of how simple it is.

With CPlusTest you choose when you want the test cases to be run - they will either run every time you build your main target or just as a part of the building the test target. Test failures are logged as errors in your test file as were they compiler errors. This struck me as a little odd but it is quite convenient as you are reasonably close to the problem area when you get a test failure - you can command-double-click through the identifiers to where you need to be quite quickly.

The last unit testing I did was many years ago with a particularly grim piece of code called The Test Harness back in the days where real men spat Fortran - the ease with which unit testing can be deployed deployed now really is a pleasure.