Software QA FYI - SQAFYI

Unit Testing with CPPUnit

By: JM JM

Within a Quality Assurance process, we have mainly two kinds of tests:

Unit tests (or acceptance tests): a set of verifications we can make to each logic unit in our system. With each test, we're checking its behavior, without keeping in mind all collaborations with other units.

System tests (or integration tests): every test allows you to check system's behavior, emphasizing unit collaborations.

We're going to speak about "unit testing" and how we can apply it in our C/C++ project, through a CPPUnit unit testing framework.

I'm going to consider that you know what unit testing is, and why it is very important in the software development process. If you want to read more about the unit testing basis, you can check the JUnit Web site.

Unit Testing Design
Think about a typical scenario in a development team: A programmer is testing his or her code by using the debugger. With this tool, you can check each variable value in every program at any time. By running step by step, you can verify whether a variable has the expected value. This is powerful, but pretty slow and it might have plenty of errors. A few programmers can keep their mind in a deep, hard, and long debugging process and, after one or two hours, the programmer's brain is near break down. All these repetitive and hard verifications can be done automatically, with a few programming instructions and proper tools.

These tools I'm going to speak about are called "unit testing frameworks." With them, you can write small modules that help you to test modules (classes, functions, or libraries) of your applications.

Let's see this example: We're programming a small program module, whose main responsibility is just to add two numbers. As we're coding in plain C, this module is represented by a C function:

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Unit Testing with CPPUnit