Best practices
This is meant to be a collection of tips and miscellaneous information
which might help and/or give a better understanding of the inner
workings (and quirks ?).
- preamble
-
My interest in Lua is as a complete development environment, this
is also where unit testing "shines" the most. It replaces Java as
my language of choice, which also explains the terminology
(classes, classpath,...).
- structure of a test
-
Ideas :
- no coupling between test methods
- common parts can be put in setUp and tearDown methods
-
variables can be passed as follows :
- global variables
-
sandboxed through use of LuaNMP, every test method has
it's own copy. But conflicts may arise with your class
under test.
- local variables
-
sandboxed through use of LuaNMP, every test method has
it's own copy
- through the
self instance
-
valid alternative to local variables. But does not work
with
setUpClass nor tearDownClass,
and they only exist within the test method instance (are
not copied back to the test results).
- structure of test classes/methods
-
Generally tests are written on a per class basis, which makes them
easier to maintain. So every
ClassXX has a
TestClassXX test class. These test classes can be
run directly from the command line, but easier is to organise them
in a TestRunner class. Here you can, for example,
group all tests of some specific application including (or
excluding) all used "library" functions. Since the actual runner
is an instance of btd.lua.Test you can invoke the
run method as many times as necessary and the results
will be collected in one report (the opposite is also possible of
course by instantiating a runner per set of tests). This also
makes it possible to chain testrunner classes.
- which methods to test
-
You can of course run all test runners for the entire application
and for all libraries included (even if only one function is
actually used) and eventually generate enormous error listings. In
that case one might opt for only running tests for the actually
used library methods.
- test results
-
The test results are reported to 'stdio' and/or to 'stderr' if the
errorIDE flag is set. They are however also collected
in the testrunner instance to do with as you please :).
- class path
-
You should setup the lua path to include your test environment.
