"Dave Steffen" <dgsteffen@numerica.us> wrote in message news:17873.61503.991989.419018@yttrium.numerica.us...
Hi Folks,
We've been using the boost unit test library for over a year now, and we're very happy with it. There's one little nit, though, and I'm curious about what people think it means, and what people have been doing about it.
The issue is "expected failures".
Expected failures are specified at the test case level, e.g.
BOOST_TEST_CASE( test_case_name, expected failures )
If you are using "auto" facility it's done like this: BOOST_AUTO_TEST_CASE_EXPECTED_FAILURES( my_test1, 1 ) BOOST_AUTO_TEST_CASE( my_test1 ) { ..... }
{ ... }
So, one could have a test case with, say, four assertions (a.k.a. BOOST_CHECK), and specify that you expect two to fail. Fine. How do you know if the two that failed were the two you expected to fail?
Yep. That's the reason expected failures usage should be limited. Note though that id number of failures os less than expected it's also treated as error.
One solution is "don't do that": have only one assertion per test case. We find that to be extremely cumbersome; if it take 20 lines of code to set up an object and put it into a given state, we'd have to duplicate those 20 lines of code across multiple test cases (or, alternately, extract them into a helper function, which is annoying and not always possible).
Fixture is your friend Here is an example of fixture usage: struct F { F() : i( 0 ) { BOOST_TEST_MESSAGE( "setup fixture" ); } // here in constructor you do your 20 lines of code to set up ~F() { BOOST_TEST_MESSAGE( "teardown fixture" ); } int i; }; //____________________________________________________________________________// // this test case will use struct F as fixture BOOST_FIXTURE_TEST_CASE( my_test1, F ) { // you have direct access to non-private members of fixture structure BOOST_CHECK( i == 1 ); } //____________________________________________________________________________// // you could have any number of test cases with the same fixture BOOST_FIXTURE_TEST_CASE( my_test2, F ) { BOOST_CHECK_EQUAL( i, 2 ); BOOST_CHECK_EQUAL( i, 0 ); } //____________________________________________________________________________// Enjoy, Gennadiy P.S. You will need 1.34 RC for above example to work I believe.