Thursday, January 26, 2012

TDD with QtCreator

I'm feeling better about TDD. I might even be seeing some real benefits even though there's hardly any code yet.

To begin with, let's get some setup out of the way. One challenge was to get gtest working with QtCreator. A question I've had is whether to have one executable containing all my tests, or whether to split tests into multiple executables. This is somewhat significant, since my goal is to type CTRL-R in QtCreator and have the tests build and run -- since the TDD methodology means running tests often, it has to be easy and fast. On the other hand, it seems logical to split tests up into separate executables in case I only want to run one set (e.g. the image tests). I came up with the following solution.
1) Have the makefile produce multiple executables.
2) Have the makefile produce a run_test.sh script that runs all the executables, stopping if there's a breakage and echoing "ALL TESTS PASS" if not. This makes it easy to see when all the tests pass (hopefully the majority of the time). The rule to make the script is quite simple:

make_exec_script: $(TESTS)
echo '#!/bin/sh' > $(EXEC_SCRIPT)
for i in $(TESTS); do \
echo "./$$i && \\" >> $(EXEC_SCRIPT); \
done
echo 'echo " " && \\' >> $(EXEC_SCRIPT); \
echo 'echo \* \* \* ALL TESTS PASSED \* \* \*' >> $(EXEC_SCRIPT)
chmod 755 $(EXEC_SCRIPT)

Now I just set the project up to execute the script, and I'm done. Granted, this won't work on Windows. Poor Windows. Always the oddball.

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