This document assumes you have already installed TextTest as described in the Installation Guide. To do these exercises, start by downloading the "systems under test" and test data from here. Unzip it and then set the environment variable TEXTTEST_HOME to point at its "tests" directory.

For each exercise there is a subdirectory of "tests" containing the program you are to test and any test-data : you should use TextTest to create tests under that directory in each case. Exercise 3 is the exception: it has no directory because the point is to modify the tests you have made in the other exercises.

There are a total of 5 exercises. It is suggested to start with exercise 1 and then Exercise 2 which covers most of the things a normal testsuite is likely to run into. The others are mostly useful for when you wish to use the features that they are aimed at exploring.

You can also download my own solutions to these exercises in case you get stuck or just prefer to browse a solution rather than try to create one yourself...

Before you start it might be worth setting up TextTest's text editor to use something you're familiar with. By default it will use "emacs" on POSIX-based systems and "notepad" on Windows. To e.g. use "gedit" instead, create a file at ~/.texttest/config containing the line

view_program:gedit

Change directory to "tests/ex2_searchreplace". Here you will find the script "searchreplace.py" and a file "file.txt" which is meant as test data. Start by trying it out a bit so you understand what it does and what you're trying to test. For example, try something like the following:

gewoia : cat file.txt
bar
gewoia : ./searchreplace.py bar foo file.txt
searchreplace.py running at 22Oct11:47:03
Replacing 'bar' with 'foo'
Replacing in /nfs/vm/texttest/geoff/course/tests/searchreplace/file.txt
1c1
< bar
---
> foo
OK to commit?
y
gewoia : cat file.txt
foo

It's probably easiest to close the TextTest static GUI from "Hello World" and restart it with

texttest.py --new

which will ask you for the details of your new program. (Starting without arguments again will reload your hello world test). You can also do "Add Application" with the Hello World tests still loaded if you prefer.

Select the script, choose the "ex2_searchreplace" directory as subdirectory, choose a suitable extension as you did for Hello World (don't choose "txt" as that will cause confusion with "file.txt").

The easiest test to specify is one that contains no arguments. Create a test as for Hello World. You should get some kind of "Usage" error from the script. Save this behaviour as correct.

This time enter e.g. "foo bar file.txt" (if you changed the file as in my example above) in the "Command Line Options" field in the "Add Test" dialog box. (Or copy the test, right click "Definition" files and add an "options" file with the same contents). Either way, you get a test containing an "options" file. If you run it you will get different text, probably the first two lines of the "trial" output from above. It won't actually do any replacement yet (bear with it until the next step). Save the behaviour.

Run the test again. Note that it fails, because it records the current time which has now moved on. We need to tell TextTest to ignore this difference.

To rectify this you'll need to edit your "config file", which you do by selecting the "config" tab (top right in the "static GUI"). In this tab you will find a file "config.<extension>" under "Files For <your application name>". If you have defined a personal configuration file it will also be present: don't edit that as it is specific to your user. Double-click the application file described, which will open it in the editor described in the introduction. A lot of what's hard about TextTest is editing this file correctly and most of the exercises involve doing so.

Read the documentation on filtering the output, there are lots of more or less sophisticated ways to do this, from ignoring the entire line to replacing any date of that format via a regular expression. Choose one and proceed to the next step when you can run the test and it goes green. You can test any changes you do without needing to rerun the test every time, by pressing "F5" (Recompute Status) in the dynamic GUI, which will rerun the filtering on an existing test run. The filtered versions of the files can be viewed by right-clicking on the files also.

You may wonder why the last test didn't try to update "file.txt". The reason is that TextTest doesn't yet know that this file is supposed to be test data. The test is running in TextTest's temporary "sandbox" environment where there is no such file.

We should rectify this by ensuring the sandbox environment gets populated with the file. TextTest identifies test data via local file names (in this case "file.txt") and searches the test and then each parent suite in turn for such a file. So you can tell it to pick up this file just by adding

copy_test_path:file.txt

to your config file as above. To understand better what is happening here you can look up "copy_test_path" in the TextTest configuration reference for help (or the page on "Test Data" for a wider overview).

As there is already such a file in the "root suite" (the top level of the hierarchy) that file will now be copied for all tests. So the test you made in step 4 will now behave differently. If you want to make a new test and preserve the old test as it was, make a copy of the old test using TextTest, and then go to the shell and move "file.txt" to the appropriate directory. (This is a good opportunity to explore a bit the file structure TextTest is creating for you: everything is plain text files and can usually be edited fairly easily outside of the tool also)

If you run this test again it will fail: the reason is that it writes out the absolute path to the file it has edited, so you can see where the "TextTest sandbox" is in this case. TextTest has a built-in filter for this path as many applications need to filter it. Look for "INTERNAL" in the documentation and try to replace the path with something so we're still verifying that the correct file is being edited. View your filtered file as before and make sure it looks OK.

The edit is rejected in the test above because the test asks for a response on standard input which is not provided. So take a new copy, select it and right click on "Definition Files", picking "Create/Import File". Select "stdin" for standard input, create a new file and type "y" in it. This will provide this response to standard input. If you run the test now the text saying "Not editing the file" will go away.

The test is hopefully now editing the file as we request, but we need to prove that. Start by setting "create_catalogues:true" in the config file, which will give us a check on all the files it's producing. This will affect all 4 tests so you should run them all.

You should get 4 rows all saying "catalogue new". On the right you have a status summary which is worth getting to know. There should be a row saying "Group 1: 3". This is TextTest's way of saying these 3 tests have changed in the same way. Click on this row and it will select the tests in the test view. If you view the "Test" tab you can see that the first three tests are now saying that no files were changed, as we expect. You can now save them without needing to examine each one individually.

Hopefully our new test will tell us that file.txt is being edited. Save it.

That's good, but we still can't see the new text in the file itself. To do this, refer to the docs section on "tests that write files" for how to do this using "collate_file".

You've hopefully got 3 or 4 tests that work now. You may well have several identical files for different tests. Of course, this isn't a problem for this size of testsuite but can become a major pain when you've got a few hundred tests.

The way to reduce this duplication is to rearrange the hierarchy. If several tests require the same contents in a particular file, create a Test Suite and move those tests to it. You can then have a single copy of the file in the test suite instead of several identical ones in each test.

Your last two tests could move to a suite containing "file.txt", for example. You could also define the "options" file at the root suite level and clear them in the single test that doesn't want any command line options (search for "Options Files" in the Test Suite Guide for assistance).

Start by running, e.g.

texttest.py -b nightjob

which will run all the tests from your previous exercises from the command line and send a mail to your user. If this doesn't work for some reason (like mail not being set up on your local machine), you can set "batch_use_collection:true" in both the config files, run it again, and look under ~/.texttest/tmp/nightjob*. There will be a file starting with "batchreport" which contains what the email would have sent had it worked... (The point of this setting is ordinarily to collect several such reports together before mailing a joint one somewhere)

The text report is basic : it only shows one run at once and isn't very navigable. Read the information about generating HTML reports and try to produce one that looks something like the example linked there. You might also want to try to make sure both your applications write their results on the same page given that they're both quite small.

Note you will need to add configuration entries to both your "config" files, though you probably won't need the TextTest GUI. Note also that by default runs are identified by date, so once you have a page with a single column, further runs won't appear there unless you explcitly name the run (-name on the command line)

It's not so nice that we've had to copy the same information to two different files. Try to extract it out to a separate file and "import" it into your config files. Look at "import_config_file" in the TextTest configuration reference for information on how to do this.

Instructions for how to do this can be found here.

There is a small toy "bug system" in the exercise directory. It is downloaded from the PyGTK tutorial and is not "primed" for StoryText or anything. Fire it up and click around it a bit, you can hide and show the bugs in various categories and also sort the columns by clicking them, but you can't do much else...

From this point you can pretty much follow the GUI-testing tutorial, which is designed to work with this example. Try to create some different tests and examine the "usecase" files and the "output" files in each one, and also the UI map file as it develops.

This exercise assumes you have the Mercurial version-control system and the GCC C compiler installed. If you don't you need to get them.

In the directory for exercise 5, under scripts/automatic_build.py you will find a small "continuous integration" script. The basic idea is to update some code (in fact a C hello world program) from Mercurial source control, if there are changes trigger a build on several machines in parallel, and send an email if any of them fail. The aim of the exercise is to create repeatable TextTest tests for this apparently hard-to-test script without even making any changes to it...

Go to the ex5_ci_script directory and run "scripts/automatic_build.py". (It expects to be run from this directory) There are no updates from source control, so it does not do anything. Note however that it created a timestamped directory under "logs" containing a file showing what the source control did.

Run texttest.py --new, select the script above, and create a test for no changes, as done before. The script tries to update "source" from "repo" so you'll need to add both of these as test data as you did in exercise 2. "repo" can be linked with "link_test_path" as we don't expect the script to make changes there.

It will however fail if you run it again, because it tells you about its log directory which is timestamped. Filter it in the same way as you did with exercise 2.

The test is now repeatable, but it tells us it's writing some logs, which we can't see. Let's make sure they're sensible. Set "create_catalogues:true" in the config file as before, which will give us a check on all the files it's producing. It shows us we're creating a file "src_update" in our timestamped log directory, and that some Mercurial control file is being edited. Generalise the filter for the timestamp so it filters the catalogue file also (you can duplicate it but it's neater to use a file-expansion wildcard in the key name). We don't care about the Mercurial control file, so tell TextTest to ignore changes there by setting "test_data_ignore:.hg".

We should now check what's in src_update. Use "collate_file" as before to make this file part of the baseline for the test. You'll need to use a file expansion this time: note that directories beginning with "." do not match the simple expansion "*", so you'll need to provide part of the name also.

There is one problem still: the test still relies on the Mercurial checkout ("source") being up to date. You should capture this state somehow so that the test doesn't fail if further checkins are made using Mercurial. Read the documentation on "mocking" for guidance: the "intercepting and replaying..." mechanism is probably most appropriate here. Record the interaction with the "hg" program and check it looks sensible. You'll need to filter the sandbox directory too, but we did that in exercise 2 also.

We now have a perfect test for no changes in source control!

Investigate what the script does in these circumstances outside of TextTest first, so you understand what you're testing. Go to the shell in the exercise directory. As we've seen, the script uses Mercurial ("hg") to update the directory "source" from the directory "repo". So trigger a change and see what happens. Make an edit in repo/main.c, check it in via "hg commit -m 'change' repo", and then rerun scripts/automatic_build.py. The local build should succeed, the remote one should fail (can't reach "my_other_machine" / SSH isn't installed) and an email should be delivered (though as we saw in exercise 3 this may not work, depending on your machine setup).

We can now add a test for this. Trigger another change as we did above, but create a test instead. Note that the "source" directory will be copied before each test run and the updates performed on the copy, so the test can be run repeatedly without needing to do more checkins.

If you've handled Mercurial correctly in step 5.5 you should be able to capture the current Mercurial behaviour and protect your tests from future changes in the repository also. Note that TextTest also captures the file edit made by Mercurial and replays it, even when you run the test without running Mercurial for real.

When the test for the build triggering and succeeding is working, you can then deliberately introduce a compilation failure and repeat, to create a test for the build failing.

You should now have 3 repeatable tests, congratulations!

Each time you run the tests where builds fail it tries to send an email. We probably don't want to be sending these emails for real, but we do want to check that they're sent correctly. All the more so if our "real" mail sending is broken and we can't see it being sent at all...

Our test program is written in Python so we can use a feature specific to Python programs that can intercept the email-sending module "smtplib" in a similar way to how we handled the command-line "hg" program above. See here for documentation of this setting.

We can then "record" the email sending and check the email arrives and looks right, and then when running the test check our interaction with the "smtplib" module remains the same as when we recorded it.

The remote build is always failing: it's trying to reach a machine that doesn't exist with ssh.

Create a fake "ssh" program as "executable test data" for the "build succeeds" test, as described on the "mocking" documentation page, so that we have control of this. Just write a script in any language you want, and make sure that it has execute permissions.

Your "fake ssh" should probably say what machine it's supposed to be running on, and perform the build locally, remembering to pass on the exit code which the build script makes use of. If you haven't done so already, collate the remote build log also so you can see the text you write out.