NAME

gtestrunner - GTk+ based frontend to Perl unit testing

SYNOPSIS

gtestrunner Tests/MySuite.pm
gtestrunner Tests::MySuite
gtestrunner

DESCRIPTION

The program gtestrunner provides a comfortable and intuitive graphical user interface for running Perl unit tests.

If you don't know what unit tests or test driven development are, please start reading the documentation for Test::Unit(3pm), or search the internet for "JUnit" and "test driven development".

The sources for Test-Unit-GTestRunner contain a directory "Suites" with several dummy testsuites and test cases. They can serve as an example for you, and allow you to see gtestrunner in action. Change to the source directory and try

gtestrunner Suites/TS_TopLevel.pm

or

gtestrunner Suites::TS_TopLevel

In fact, gtestrunner supports every way of test suite loading, that the underlying framework Test::Unit(3pm) supports. If you don't pass an argument to the script, you can load a test suite from within the user interface.

The program gtestrunner is actually a script wrapper around Test::Unit::GTestRunner(3pm).

GUI OVERVIEW

The graphical user interface to gtestrunner follows the usual scheme of an application window and shouldn't contain any surprises to you.

The GUI mainly consists of a drop down menu, a toolbar, a progress bar, and a tabbed summary window. The tabbed summary window provides two different views, a flat lists of failures and a tree view of all tests, with indicators for success and failure for the individual test cases.

In either view you can select individual parts of your test suite. In case of test failures, you will see the corresponding error message in the lower window. You can also click the "Selected" button next to the "Run" button in the toolbar in order to re-run the corresponding tests.

TOOLBAR

The toolbar features five buttons:

Open

A file selection dialog allows you to load a different test suite. Please make sure that the selected test suite compiles in the current working directory.

Run

Runs the entire test suite.

Selected

Read the label as "(Run) Selected". Run only the currently selected part of the test suite. In the failures view, you can only select individual tests. In the tree view you can select arbitrary parts of your test suite.

Cancel

Tries to terminate the currently running test suite.

Quit

Yes, exactly! No, no confirmation dialog. I knew you would appreciate that.

MENU

The menu bar provides no more functionality than the toolbar. Please see the description of the corresponding toolbar buttons.

INTERNALS

The frontend loads the test suite passed as a command-line argument, or selected in the file selection dialog. Nothing is recompiled when test suites are (re-)opened! The initial loading of the test suite in the frontend is needed so that the frontend can already display the tree structure of the tests.

Every test run spawns a new Perl interpreter as a child process. The child interpreter is invoked with a -I argument (see perl(1)) for each member of the @INC array, so that the child process searches the same directories as the parent process. The child process does not know about the test tree structure that the parent process has determined.

Therefore, it is safe to modify the modules that are tested, because they will be re-compiled on every test run; they are executed in the context of a child process.

Adding or removing tests, test cases or test suites is not safe. Since the parent process does not recompile the test suite, it will not notice any changes and get completely out of sync with the child process.

All other modifications are "semi-safe". Choose your own poison; in doubt restart the program.

This behavior is suboptimal but difficult to change.

AUTHOR

Copyright (C) 2004-2005, Guido Flohr <guido@imperia.net>, all rights reserved. See the source code for details.

This software is contributed to the Perl community by Imperia (http://www.imperia.net/).

ENVIRONMENT

The package is internationalized with libintl-perl, hence the environment variables "LANGUAGE", "LANG", "LC_MESSAGES", and "LC_ALL" will influence the language in which the GUI and messages are presented.

SEE ALSO

Test::Unit::GTestRunner(3pm), Test::Unit::TestRunner(3pm), Test::Unit(3pm), Locale::Messages(3pm), perl(1)

cpanm Test::Unit::GTestRunner

perl -MCPAN -e shell
install Test::Unit::GTestRunner