Andy Balaam’s Blog

I am still working slowly on moving FreeGuide forward. Somehow it seems my itches for FreeGuide are all about making it less annoying for people who are trying it the first time. I guess this is motivated by my desire for world domination.

Anyway, we are one small step closer to my mum being able to use FreeGuide - when the “Choose channels” step (i.e. the XMLTV grabber configuration) goes wrong, you can now see a real genuine error message, and hopefully figure out what went wrong.

Actually, it always used to work that way but the error-catching got refactored away at some point. Anyway, I am slowly taking the ground back…

As I do more and more test-driven development at work I am becoming completely addicted. For this FreeGuide code I wrote a couple of unit tests but they are not within a proper framework, and can’t be launched easily as a test suite. I am considering JUnit.

I also want to set up some component-level tests e.g. for downloading listings for each country and checking everything works as expected. It’s brilliant fun having tests in place, but when you have as little time as I have for FreeGuide at the moment, it’s difficult to decide to spend a long time working on a test framework when I could be fixing a “real user problem” or adding a cool new feature.

But I’ve got the testing bug badly, so watch this space.

At work at the moment, as part of an initiative to get with the 21st century, we are waking up to testing our code.

Thus, I am writing a lot of unit tests for old code, which can be soul-destroyingly repetitive and very pointless-feeling (even though really I do see a great value in the end result - tested code is refactorable code).

Often, tests have a lot in common with each other, so it feels right to reduce code repetition, and factor things into functions etc. The Right Way of doing this is to leave your tests as straightforward as possible, with preferably no code branches at all, just declarative statements.

Contemplating writing unit tests for the same method on 20+ very similar classes, using a template function “feels” right, for normal code values of “feel”. However, for test code, maybe it’s wrong?

My question is: is it ok to write a test function like this?:

void test_all_thingies()
{
    test_One_Thingy<Thingy1>();
    test_One_Thingy<Thingy2>();
    test_One_Thingy<Thingy3>();
    test_One_Thingy<Thingy4>();
}

template< class T >
void test_One_Thingy()
{
    T thingy;
    thingy.doSomething();
    TEST_ASSERT( thingy.isSomething() );
}

Worse still, is this ok?

void test_all_thingies()
{
    test_One_Thingy<Thingy1>( "Thingy1 expected output" );
    test_One_Thingy<Thingy2>( "Thingy2 expected output" );
    test_One_Thingy<Thingy3>( "Thingy3 expected output" );
    test_One_Thingy<Thingy4>( "Thingy4 expected output" );
}

template< class T >
void test_One_Thingy( std::string expected_output )
{
    T thingy;
    thingy.doSomething();
    TEST_ASSERT( thingy.getOutput() == expected_output );
}

Reasons for: otherwise I’m going to be writing huge amounts of copy-pasted code (unless someone can suggest a better way?).

Reasons against: how clear is it going to be which class failed the test when it fails?

Update: fixed unescaped diagonal brackets.