martanne / vis-test

Testing Infrastructure for Vis

This repository contains testing infrastructure for the vis editor. It is expected to be cloned into a sub directory of the vis source tree.

There exist 5 different kinds of tests:

• core are C unit tests for core data structures used by vis
• fuzz infrastructure for automated fuzzing
• vim tests vim compatibility
• sam tests sam compatibility of the command language
• vis contains tests for vis specific behavior/features
• lua contains tests for the vis specific lua api

Run make to execute all test suites.

Writing good tests

Each sub directory contains a README with further information about the specific test method.

Coming up with good and exhaustive tests is often non-trivial, below are some recommendations:

• Make sure you understand what the expected behavior you want to test is. Think about possible error conditions.

• Test something specific, but keep the overall context in mind.

  For vi(m) frontend related tests consider behavior when given a count or when the command is repeated (using .).

  For example the motions f, F, t, T also influence ; and ,. Similar, * and # affect n and N.

• Test special cases, these often reveal interesting behavior.

  Continuing the motion example these might be: empty lines, single letter words, no matches, consecutive matches, over-specified counts, etc.

• Test systematically and strive for high test coverage.

  It is preferable to have a small set of tests which cover a specific functionality exhaustively, rather than lots of half-baked tests which only test the basics.

  A good first indication of the completeness of your tests is the achieved code coverage. Ideally a test should primarily exercise a small set of functions which should achieve high path coverage.