Testing

A good set of tests is a critical requirement for modern software development, both to ensure the quality of the product and to help developers to quickly modify code without introducing bugs or causing regressions. The literature on software testing is vast; excellent tutorials and references are available both online and in print.

All developers are encouraged to review tests and ensure that any work is covered by both acceptance and unit tests.

Current Test Architecture

Acceptance Tests

Acceptance tests in Gnucash are based on a home-grown (or anonymously sourced) set of macros and functions which can be found in src/test-core. The quality, scope, and coverage of these tests varies greatly; some parts of GnuCash are not tested lightly or not at all, others are tested fairly extensively. While I've labelled the "acceptance tests", in many cases they're written more as unit tests whose scope is a single function rather than a whole module.

Unit Tests

Unit testing, invented by Kent Beck in the early 1990s, seeks to test all execution paths in single functions with as much isolation from the rest of the system as possible.

GnuCash has adopted the GLib testing framework to facilitate unit testing. Muslim Choclov wrote unit tests for the most important modules in LibQOF as a GSoC2011 project. Work continues to get all of LibQOF and the engine fully tested to facilitate major architectural changes needed to make GnuCash a proper database application.