X.org testing with Google Test

[Thomas Voß]

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Hi list,

my name is Thomas and I'm a software engineer in quality working for
Canonical. Our quality team is currently extending the test coverage
of Canonical's upstream projects. To this end, we are developing a
number of components for providing a unified testing landscape to
developers.

One of our focus areas is the headless automated testing of
applications and components that interact with the X display server.
For many testing scenarios, only a dummy X server without any display
capabilities is required and we abstracted/integrated start up and
tear down of such a configuration within a Google Test environment
that is readily usable by developers (see [1]).

Google Test [2] is a unit testing framework tailored towards C and
C++. It is lightweight and provides a decent set of functionality for
writing unit tests:

  * Automatic test registration: Tests are automatically discovered and
    recognized. That is, no manual maintenance for executing tests is
    required.

  * An extensive set of assertion macros is provided.

  * The XML output is compatible with JUnit's XML dialect and can be
    integrated easily with continuous integration systems (e.g. Jenkins
    [3]).

  * Support for custom test fixtures that unify test setup and cleanup
    procedures, thus avoiding boiler plate code within the actual test.

  * Support for custom test environments for bundling problem specific
    setup and cleanup routines.

Our extension to Google Test defines a custom test environment and a
custom test fixture that take care of starting up and tearing down a
dummy xserver environment (environment.h) as well as opening up a
display connection (test.h). Moreover, a custom main is included
within our extension that extends Google Test's main and makes sure
that our dummy X server testing environment is known to the whole test
suite. Please see [4] for a usage scenario within utouch-frame and [5]
for xorg-gtest's doxygen documentation.

As we think that this kind of unified testing architecture might be of
interest to a wider developer audience, we would like to bring it to
your attention by this mail. The project is currently hosted in
cndougla's freedesktop.org place, but we feel a better home would be
on freedesktop.org. It looks like a good landing spot would be in
xorg/test on the git.freedesktop.org page. Is there a formal process
for proposing projects, or should we just create a repository there?

Of course, your feedback is highly appreciated.

Kind regards,

  Thomas

[1] http://cgit.freedesktop.org/~cndougla/xorg-gtest/
[2] http://code.google.com/p/googletest/
[3] http://jenkins-ci.org/
[4]
http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~utouch-team/utouch-frame/trunk/view/head:/test/x11/recording.cpp
[5] http://people.freedesktop.org/~cndougla/xorg-gtest
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