Distributed Unit Testing: supporting multiple platforms accurately and efficiently

Peñalvo García, José Francisco, Santos, Pablo

Description

Colecciones : DIA. Artículos del Departamento de Informática y AutomáticaIUCE. Artículos del Instituto Universitario de Ciencias de la Educación GRIAL. Artículos del Grupo de Investigación en Interacción y E-learning
Fecha de publicación : nov-2006
Testing is the most basic way to check the evolution of a software project. A strong test suite helps development team assuring that a certain minimum is always kept. Release after release software must pass a test group, large enough to check, at least, the most common use cases. Results will numerically show project s progress. Depending on the project testing could be done on different platforms under various operating systems. Forcing race conditions and heavy load is also a desired feature for the test suite.

Sujets

• Informatique
• Marketing et communication

Informations

• Publié par: Salamanca
• Publié le: 01 novembre 2006
• Nombre de lectures: 49
• Licence : En savoir +
  Paternité, pas d'utilisation commerciale, partage des conditions initiales à l'identique
• Langue: Español

Extrait

Core Technology

by Pablo Santos and Francisco J. Garcia

Distributed UnitTesting Supporting multiple platforms accurately and efficiently At Codice Software we design and develop software configuration management tools that run on various combinations of operating systems and hardware platforms. For instance, both serv- er and clients run on Windows XP/2000/2003/Vista, Linux, and Mac OS X. And since our soft- ware uses .NET, it runs on native Microsoft implementation for Windows and Mono for UNIX- like operating systems. There’s only one way to accurately the testing process. The key to our distributed testing solution is P C a o b d l ic o e     i S s  o a f   t S w o a ft re w .  a H re e    c E a ngi b n e eer at and efficiently support platform com- PNUnit, short for “Parallel NUnit.” PNUnit is a modified version of reached at  n binations such as these—testing, and the familiar NUnit (www.nunit.org) testing framework that was [e-mail]. lots of it. However, running a software originally ported from JUnit to .NET. The source code and related Franciscois a Professor of package on 36 platform combina- files for PNUnit are available electronically; see “Resource Center,” C U o ni m v p er u s t i e t r y     S o c f  i S e a n l c a e  m at a  t n h c e a. You tions, release after release, is a page 5. can reach him at Herculean effort. The solution we We were already using NUnit to develop unit tests because our [e-mail] adopted was to distribute testing tasks development is .NET based. NUnit lets you write unit tests with all by running them in parallel. In addi- .NET languages, and even adhere to test-driven development princi- tion to uncovering bugs, this ples. Still, our primary concern was testing on multiple platforms approach significantly speeded up using distributed test scenarios. Unfortunately, stock NUnit doesn’t support this, hence our decision to extend NUnit to support distrib- uted testing. One of the reasons we wanted to stick with the NUnit framework is that we were familiar with its environment. Usually when you move to a new testing platform, the first thing you have to do is learn a new scripting language. By extending NUnit, we could use the same pro- gramming language and constructions (test suites, fixtures, and the like) that we were used to with regular unit testing. Developing Automated Tests with PNUnit Figure 1 shows the basic structure and main components of the PNUnit system. Launcher is the program responsible for launching test suites on test machines. It is called by a test configuration file as an argument, reads the file, and sends instructions to the testing machines. It then gathers test results and prints them on the screen. The test configuration (testconf) file is written in XML and contains a definition of the test scenario being created. It defines

IPNUnitServices Runner

IPNUnitAgent PNUnitAgent Launcher.exe

TestAssembly

Agent.exe Figure 1:PNUnit high-level structure. 28 Dr. Dobb’s Journallwww.ddj.comlNovember 2006

PNUnit TestRunner