8.2.5. How to use unit tests

Verify that the unit testing framework is work is working as expected:

waf build_unit_test
waf build_unit_test --coverage

Typical usage and more information on the unit tests can be found in Unit tests.

8.2.6. How to exclude files from unit tests

Normally, all files should be covered by a (at least empty) unit test. If a certain file is not meant to be covered by unit tests, it has to be excluded in several locations in order to suppress checking mechanisms in the toolchain.

The configuration of ceedling is stored in a file called project.yml. In this file the files that will not receive any coverage must be added to :uncovered_ignore_list:. Otherwise, ceedling will report uncovered files.

Additionally, the main wscript contains a mechanism that checks that every file has a corresponding test file in the proper location. Untested files have to be added to excl in check_test_files(ctx).

8.2.7. Using ceedling directly

Warning

Ceedling (the unit test runner that is used by this project) is wrapped by the waf-toolchain. The toolchain makes sure that the path handed to ceedling contains the necessary applications and files, so without the wrapper extensive knowledge of the project structure is helpful.

That being said, it is normally not necessary to directly execute ceedling as the wrapper handles this.

The waf-script of this project executes always the complete unit test-suite. This can take some time. When developing or debugging a unit test, it might be beneficial to have finer control over which test is executed.

For this and especially for debugging the unit test integration it is possible to directly access ceedling. It is therefore necessary for the shell from which ceedling is run that all dependencies are available. Especially, it is necessary that it is possible to find ceedling from the current PATH of the shell in which this is attempted. This will not be covered in this manual.

Once such a shell is available it also has to be made sure that all files that are generated or adapted on-the-fly are available in the build-directory. This can be ensured by executing the waf-task build_unit_test just until ceedling is run by it. After this step (it does not matter whether the task completes or is imported after it has generated the dependencies) the following example can be executed.

# go to the build directory of ceedling, assuming the current directory is
# the project root (IMPORTANT, otherwise it will not work correctly)
cd build/unit_test/

# interact directly with ceedling (refer to ceedling manual for details)
# this line executes test_plausibility.c with coverage
ceedling gcov:test_plausibility.c

# should the current shell not be able to directly follow the ceedling.cmd
# file, it might be necessary to access the vendored ceedling directly:
ruby ../../tools/vendor/ceedling/bin/ceedling gcov:test_plausibility.c