[GNC-dev] [GNC] Unit Tests

[john]

> On Aug 11, 2022, at 4:56 AM, Robert Simmons <rsimmons0 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Looking at the code repo I see a directory of unit tests, but it doesn't
> look like it has actual unit tests. Do you all do continuous integration
> somewhere and have unit tests? When a software defect is identified and
> fixed, do you create a unit test based on the fix?

If you found only one directory of tests you didn't look very hard:
$ find * -name "*test*" -type d | wc -l
      25

The tests are mixture of unit tests, fuzzers, and integration tests. You'll notice that there are a lot more in the libgnucash/ core than in the UI-centric gnucash/; that's in large part because the MVC violations we discussed a couple of days ago make it difficult to write tests. That's actually part of a broader problem, that the code isn't well separated for responsibilities so meaningful unit tests aren't always possible.

There's a build target "check" to build and run all of the tests. We try to keep the dependencies lined up so that building all isn't a prerequisite but that occasionally gets out of whack so I generally use `ninja && ninja check` to make sure.

CI is performed via Github actions, see https://github.com/Gnucash/gnucash/tree/maint/.github/workflows.

Contrary to Derek's claim I'm afraid that none of us are sufficiently self-disciplined enough to reliably add a test when we fix a bug. It does happen from time to time, but tests are more often added when refactoring or rewriting than when bug fixing.

Regards,
John Ralls