UnitTest++

March 19, 2006 @ 21:36 | In Programming | No Comments |

I read today in Games from Within that a new unit test framework have been released: UnitTest++, an improved version of CppUnitLite. I’ve been using unit tests for a long time, mostly as a regression error tester and to report bugs in the database. Under the architecture I work, a framework for unit test is not needed. I have all the things I need to create them robustly. Anyway UnitTest may be useful in lots of sceneries.

Things that I would add to this framework that are working sucessfully in my framework:

Stacktrace in all the error, exceptions and assertions.
Create an OS exception handler to catch the exceptions generated by the OS (software and hardware) and decorate then with useful information (cpu registers, memory addresses, stacktraces…). For doing this, evil catch(…) would have to be removed from the code.
Install a memory hook to detect leaks and memory usage in each test.
Report execution times for each test. Sometimes, passing the test is not enough. With this information you can view the evolution of your code.
Generate reports in xml including all the information described so that they can be easily integrated in the report of your daily (or incremental) build.

All this can be added in future revisions, the v1.0 is useful enough to give it a try.