Unit Tests in Ancient C++

9 ^PM November 16, 2003

Since I’m off to work with C++ for a few months, I went and investigated CppUnit. CppUnit started life as a port of JUnit, but has gone on to develop some neat, C++-style features, such as the test registry.

Unfortunately, CppUnit requires a fairly modern C++ compiler. Since my client is using HP-UX 10.20, CppUnit won’t be an option.

Partly to address this need for a unit test framework, and partly as an exercise in getting my head around C++ again, I wrote my own, minature unit test framework. The source code is online, the most important file being unittest.h. The generated documentation is also online.

A quick To Do list:

Currently have just one CHECK macro, that checks an assertion is true. Should also make a CHECK_EQUAL, and possibly allow custom error messages.
Get the category mechanism working so that subsets of the unit tests may be run.
Factor out the test result display code from the UnitTestRegistry::run() method.
Display failing line numbers and file names.
Package appropriately for use in a larger project.

Being my first C++ code for quite some time, comments, suggestions and critique are very welcome.

By alang | # | Comments (0)

(Posted to Software Development and javablogs)

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