New Unit Test Structure

New Unit Test Structure for Qt

Introduction

This article focuses on the structure beneath tests/auto/ so that you know exactly where to put your tests.

Autotest Structure

Whenever something is submitted to Gerrit, it will be tested by CI System.

The testing is done by executing tests located under tests/auto/.

Questions to ask:

• Where to put the test for my new class?
• Where is the test for the class containing my new function?

The proposed answer to these questions is:

The directory structure of the tests should resemble the directory structure of the Qt source itself as much as possible.

The structural resemblance has two advantages:

1. It is easy to locate the test for a particular class.
2. It is easy to test a certain functional area in isolation.

Consider the QMutex class for example. This resides in src/corelib/thread/ and the corresponding test is located under tests/auto/corelib/thread/qmutex/.

As another example, let's say that you have made a change that is likely to affect code under src/corelib/ only. You can now execute a recursive test runner (such as 'make check') locally from tests/auto/corelib/ and thus save time by running only the tests that are likely to be sensitive to the change. (Of course, at some point, a full test run needs to be executed, but that can happen less frequently.)

Current state

By the time of this writing, test restructuring has been done for QtBase only (and there is still a bit cleanup to be done). The principle should be applied to other modules as well, and will be the responsibility of the Qt community as a whole.

The test structure in QtBase currently looks essentially like this:

auto
 corelib
 animation
 qabstractanimation <— tests for 'qabstractanimation' go here
 qanimationgroup
 ...
 ...
 thread
 qmutex <— tests for 'qmutex' go here
 qsemaphore
 ...
 ...
 dbus
 gui
 integrationtests
 network
 opengl
 other
 sql
 testlib
 tools
 xml
 v8