Testing and Debugging

Once can write tests at different levels within a Rock-Syskit system. The goal of writing tests being, as with all software testing, a reasonable level of assurance that the system will behave as expected in the real world. Each levels of tests play their part in this.

A close subject to testing is the one of debugging, that is how to diagnose and understand a bug, either in the live system or - ideally - because of a failed test. This section will also cover how to run or attach debuggers, both to inspect unit tests, and live or simulated systems.

The various levels of testing follow the development "strata", and their roles: library, component, system. Rock has support for all these levels. At the library level, it integrates existing testing libraries. On higher levels, it has testing harnesses suitable for these particular purposes, always building on top of existing testing tools and frameworks when possible. This section will base its examples on the Basics tutorial.

• Library unit tests The roles of writing unit tests for the libraries is obviously to check that their implementation match their declared contract. All major programming languages nowadays have support for unit testing, either within their standard library or as third-party libraries.
• Component unit tests Since libraries are expected to be unit tested already, the component unit tests are meant to verify the dynamic behavior, as encoded in the component: configuration, detection of error cases, … Testing components is already described in the component section
• Syskit unit tests Syskit's coordination often require writing code that is evaluated at runtime. This code must be tested, and that is one role of the Syskit unit tests. Their other role is to provide a way to run expensive model checking algorithms offline.
• Syskit integration tests These are meant to run actions or missions fed to a Syskit app seen as a blackbox, in simulation. The tests then verify the action's expected results - for instance, that the system reaches a given position, timely goes through waypoints, gathered valid data, displaced objects …

When related to testing, debugging support is presented on the same page than the testing support. Debugging for live systems is presented separately.