Eiffel - Software - Simple Test Framework

Maintainer

Thomas Beale

Description

The testing philosophy used is based on that described in the IEEE Standard for Software Test Documentation, IEEE 829-1983.

Briefly this is as follows:

Testing consists of a Test Plan, test design, and test result reporting.
A Test Plan specifies a number of Test Cases (TCs), which are usually executed according to a Test Procedure.
The test results are then the list of Pass/Fail results from the test cases, run according to the procedures.

Versions

1.0 (1998-04-24)

Features

This simple package supports the concepts as follows:

A framework application TEST_APPLICATION is inherited by any application requiring test capability; it provides a console window menu-driven interface to TEST_SUITEs and TEST_CASEs.
Test Cases are implemented with descendants of the TEST_CASE class, and are grouped under descendants of the TEST_SUITE class. All TEST_CASEs and the TEST_SUITE of a given suite typically inherit from a TEST_ENV descendant class, which contains common test data sets, procedures and utilities, thus corresponding to the Test Procedure idea.
Each TEST_CASE descendant must implement the execute function, and can optionally implement the check_result function. The check_result function is called after 'execute' and determines if the test passed or failed. In case of failure, it calls ERROR_STATUS.set_fail_reason to say why. This sets the 'failed' status of the test case.
If the "all" option of the test application is chosen, all TEST_CASEs of all TEST_SUITEs are executed, with the results
being written into result files. The default result file path is currently hard-wired into TEST_APPLICATION, and may be overridden using the command line option "/d result_dir".

Directory/Cluster Structure

One of the advantages of using this framework is that it encourages some discipline in testing, namely:

each test case coded as one class
test cases kept in known clusters, typically "cluster_x/test" where "cluster_x" contains the classes under test.
test application always available as one of the final delivered applications to be executed at any time, including each time a change is made to any cluster, in the maintenance period.

To this end, a convenient directory structure I often use on projects is:

some_root_dir/
	app_1/
	app_2/
	app_3/
	library/
		cluster_a/
			test/
		cluster_b/
			test/
		cluster_c/
			test/
	test_app_A/
	test_app_B/

Here, the test_app_Xs are seen as ordinary deliverable applications; each cluster_x has its own set of test cases, test suite and test environment in cluster_x/test (i.e. the test cases etc travel with the relevant cluster).

Supported compilers

ISE Eiffel (ISE Eiffel 4.2)

Platforms

Windows (NT 4.0)

Licensing

Copyrighted freeware (see file test-framework/License.txt)

Simple Test Framework