Advanced unit testing: how to scale up a unit test framework

Abstract

Unit testing is a scalable and effective way to uncover software faults. In the JNuke project, automated regression tests combined with coverage measurement ensured high code quality throughout the project. By using a custom testing environment, functionality was extended beyond what is commonly available by unit test frameworks. Low-overhead memory leak detection was implemented through wrapping. Automated support for log files made it possible to track the internal state of objects, which is often much more expedient than writing test code. These extensions allowed the easy-to-use unit test framework to scale up to large-scale tests. The techniques can be ported to existing test frameworks.