7.1: Introduction

SUnit is a minimal yet powerful framework that supports the creation and deployment of tests. As might be guessed from its name, the design of SUnit focussed on Unit Tests, but in fact it can be used for integration tests and functional tests as well. SUnit was originally developed by Kent Beck and subsequently extended by Joseph Pelrine and others to incorporate the notion of a resource, which we will describe in Section 7.6.

The interest in testing and Test Driven Development is not limited to Squeak or Smalltalk. Automated testing has become a hallmark of the Agile software development movement, and any software developer concerned with improving software quality would do well to adopt it. Indeed, developers in many languages have come to appreciate the power of unit testing, and versions of xUnit now exist for many languages, including Java, Python, Perl, .Net and Oracle. This chapter describes SUnit 3.3 (the current version as of this writing); the official web site of SUnit is sunit.sourceforge.net, where updates can be found.

Neither testing, nor the building of test suites, is new: everybody knows that tests are a good way to catch errors. eXtreme Programming, by making testing a core practice and by emphasizing automated tests, has helped to make testing productive and fun, rather than a chore that programmers dislike. The Smalltalk community has a long tradition of testing because of the incremental style of development supported by its programming environment. In traditional Smalltalk development, the programmer would write tests in a workspace as soon as a method was finished. Sometimes a test would be incorporated as a comment at the head of the method that it exercised, or tests that needed some set up would be included as example methods in the class. The problem with these practices is that tests in a workspace are not available to other programmers who modify the code; comments and example methods are better in this respect, but there is still no easy way to keep track of them and to run them automatically. Tests that are not run do not help you to find bugs! Moreover, an example method does not inform the reader of the expected result: you can run the example and see the — perhaps surprising — result, but you will not know if the observed behaviour is correct.

SUnit is valuable because it allows us to write tests that are self-checking: the test itself defines what the correct result should be. It also helps us to organize tests into groups, to describe the context in which the tests must run, and to run a group of tests automatically. In less than two minutes you can write tests using SUnit, so instead of writing small code snippets in a workspace, we encourage you to use SUnit and get all the advantages of stored and automatically executable tests.

In this chapter we start by discussing why we test, and what makes a good test. We then present a series of small examples showing how to use SUnit. Finally, we look at the implementation of SUnit, so that you can understand how Smalltalk uses the power of reflection in supporting its tools.