Your favorite unit test solution for LabVIEW

[Tomi Maila]

Hi,

I tried to search LAVA but couldn't find this topic. So my question is, what is your favorite unit test environment you are using to run unit tests on your LabVIEW code? What is good in the solution you are using and what are the limits of the solution? Please share your experience.

Tomi

[alexwarrior]

You may have seen this: http://zone.ni.com/devzone/cda/tut/p/id/3586

It's a unit test frame work that you can use with LabVIEW.

For most of the LabVIEW applications I work on, I am the only developer and I write my own unit tests, but don't use an automated test system. I keep a subdirectory under my main VI called 'Unit Tests' where I test out some of my SubVIs. I try write my SubVIs with unit testing in mind. So instead of writing a SubVI called 'save data file', or 'send data over UDP' I might write one called 'generate data file contents' or 'generate UDP packet contents'. That way I can easily write a unit test that displays what the data would be on the screen in a string indicator, instead of writing actual data to disk or the network.

- Alex

QUOTE(Tomi Maila @ Feb 14 2007, 01:20 PM)

Hi,

I tried to search LAVA but couldn't find this topic. So my question is, what is your favorite unit test environment you are using to run unit tests on your LabVIEW code? What is good in the solution you are using and what are the limits of the solution? Please share your experience.

Tomi

[Jim Kring]

QUOTE(Tomi Maila @ Feb 14 2007, 01:20 PM)

Hi,

I tried to search LAVA but couldn't find this topic. So my question is, what is your favorite unit test environment you are using to run unit tests on your LabVIEW code? What is good in the solution you are using and what are the limits of the solution? Please share your experience.

Tomi

Tomi,

Here is a link to a simple technique that I use for unit testing OpenG libraries:

http://forums.openg.org/index.php?showtopi...post&p=1120

[Jim Kring]

QUOTE (Jim Kring @ Feb 14 2007, 05:39 PM)

Tomi,

Here is a link to a simple technique that I use for unit testing OpenG libraries:

http://forums.openg.org/index.php?showtopi...post&p=1120

To close the loop, on this thread...

JKI has just released VI Tester, a software (unit) testing framework for LabVIEW. See here for details:

http://blog.jkisoft.com/news/jki-announces...se-in-jki-labs/

Thanks,

-Jim

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

QUOTE (Tomi Maila @ Feb 14 2007, 05:20 PM)

Hi,

I tried to search LAVA but couldn't find this topic. So my question is, what is your favorite unit test environment you are using to run unit tests on your LabVIEW code? What is good in the solution you are using and what are the limits of the solution? Please share your experience.

Tomi

I use a technique I got from my collegue who delveloped LuaVIEW. It is simple VI that sits in the root of all my project directories and on startup scans the entire subdirectory hierachy for folders having the name "unit tests". Any VI in there having a predefined connector pane that returns a boolean will be loaded and presented in a list. The UI allows to then run all tests or individual ones and the result of the run is shown. The UI also has options to directly open the front panel so that when a test indicates failure I can go and directly debug it.

Very simple and trivial but quite effective. The only drawback is having to write the actual unit tests , but that is a problem every unit test framework has.

Rolf Kalbermatter

[ElijahKerry]

You may be intereted to know that National Instruments released a new product last week called the LabVIEW Unit Test Framework Toolkit. It allows you to create automated test suites for your project and includes report generation functionality.

Here's a white paper on how to use it. You can also download the 30 day evaluation for 8.6.1 or later from here.