[Repast-developer] unit tests

[Nick C. <sr...@ea...>]

Hi,

I've begun consolidating the various junit unit tests that I've created. 
I've made a new directory uchicago/src/sim/test and placed the various 
tests in there. These all use the junit testing framework created by 
those giants among men Erich Gamma and Kent Beck (see www.junit.org).

The README attempts to summarize what each test does and what it 
requires in the way of external libraries. To run the tests you'll need 
to get a hold of junit from the above url. Once it is installed, make 
sure you start it with a classpath that includes wherever you've 
compiled the tests and whatever external library those tests need. For 
example,

java -cp 
/home/nick/classes:/usr/local/junit/junit.jar:/home/nick/repast/lib/colt.jar 
junit.swingui.TestRunner

You'll get a nice gui where you can load the class file that contains 
your test (e.g. uchicago.src.sim.test.NetworkTest).

Writing these sorts of unit tests serves two purposes (or at least it 
works that way for me). The first is, of course, to exercise some API to 
find bugs and I invariably do. The second is to test the semantics of 
the API itself by actually using it. In fact, developing the tests in 
conjuction with developing the API helps with the conceptual/semantic 
part of framework development.

So, the point of all this is that if you change the framework in some 
way, see if there is a relevant test that you can add to and run. If 
not, try and create some tests to exercise your changes. Of course 
writing tests is a bit tedious, but junit makes a lot more "fun".

There's only a few tests in the the test directory at the moment, but 
there's some offhand, one-off tests scattered througout the repast 
source tree and even more in my own non-public test directory. In the 
next few days, I'll try and consolidate these and make unit tests out of 
them where applicable.

Nick

-- 
Nick Collier
Social Science Research Computing
University of Chicago
http://repast.sourceforge.net