How to set up unit tests in a JUCE app

General JUCE discussion
1

Hi there,

I started working on a JUCE-based GUI application. I would like to follow a TDD approach, so I was wondering how and where I should put the actual test cases. I know how to use UnitTest and UnitTestRunner classes, but it’s not 100% clear (to me) how to integrate them in the main application.
Should I create a parallel JUCE project (command-line project) or keep the test cases in the main application and run them somewhere/somehow inside my JUCEApplication instance?

Thanks in advance!

2 Likes
2

TDD is an interesting and useful approach, but I see it as being mostly useful with dynamic weak-typed languages like Ruby/JavaScript. I think the most important kind of tests are integration / “end to end” tests. I’m not sure how easy it would be to set these kinds of tests up in a JUCE app.

It would be great to have something like this though - testing button presses, text entry and text appearing on the screen.

1 Like
3

IIRC the Button class has a triggerClick() method that emulates an actual click, with the component blinking and all the rest. perhaps methods like that could be added to the other GUI components to improve testability

2 Likes
4

If your project is an application anyway then you can just invoke the tests based on a command line argument (look at the Projucer code for an example of launching a GUI vs a command line app in the same codebase). If it’s a plugin then perhaps a separate command line app is the way to go. If you later move to server-based builds and continuous integration then you can then easily build and tun these tests on the server.

2 Likes
5

Hi guys, thanks for your replies. @martinrobinson-2: I’m interested in launching a GUI vs a command line app in the same codebase, so that I can let the test suite live alongside the main application. Does the Projucer work that way?