Philosophical Geek

I’ve got a great process using NUnit in all my .Net projects. However, at work we have a large MFC/C++ application that has NO automated testing. I’ve been planing on getting unit testing into it for quite a while, but finally decided this is the week to do it.

It turns out that C++ unit testing is nowhere near as standardized or easy as .Net or Java. Partly, it’s the lack of reflection/introspection, but I think it’s also because the language itself just doesn’t lend itself to it.

There are a few very good resources for C++ unit testing. I first came across Noel Llopis’ Exploring the C++ Unit Testing Framework Jungle. I was just about set on using CxxTest, just as he had decided, but realizing that the post was written at the end of 2004, I continued my research. Sure, something must have improved since then! I came across UnitTest++: The New choice for C++ Unit Testing. It turns out to be partially written by Noel Llopis, so I thought this must be good since he gave such good reviews of the earlier solutions. You can read more about it here.

UnitTest++ seems to be the best of all possible worlds. It’s extremely simple to add test cases. I won’t include examples here, because the previous links have plenty.

The only thing I wish I could find is an open source code coverage C++ tool. I couldn’t survive without NUnit/NCover in C#.

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