Re: [boost] doxygen doc / STL container unit test

Subject: Re: [boost] doxygen doc / STL container unit test
From: Andrew Sutton (andrew.n.sutton_at_[hidden])
Date: 2009-09-11 21:52:29

This question is definitely a good one. Because it

> immediately reveals two important points about testing:
>
> (1) Tests should be reusable
> (2) Tests should be structured along concepts
>
> as concepts are composable and refinable, also
> the concept tests should be composable and refinable.
>
> I did not research if there are efforts at boost to support such
> kind of concept based testing. But I think the usefulness of such
> a framework is obvious.
>

I committed something similar for the BGL test suite (test_graph.cpp, I
think in trunk). It's not nearly as formal and primarily just exercises the
Graph concept interfaces. Mostly it's just a framework for sanity testing a
graph adaptor or data structure. Also virtually no documentation.

One of the things that I found was that generically testing data structures
requires a fairly complete set of type traits and metafunctions that query
types based on their concepts. I'm using these to extensively tag dispatch
some of the test methods.

It seems like a good approach, but it's not easy to write.

Andrew Sutton
andrew.n.sutton_at_[hidden]