This is a basic guide to what the GUI looks like, and how to write your first test. It assumes you have read and followed the instructions in the installation guide.

We will use a 'hello world' program as an example. Note that this tutorial is also Exercise 1 in the course material, so if you want to work through it yourself it's suggested you download it from here, unzip it and then set the environment variable TEXTTEST_HOME to point at its "tests" directory.

Text in italics is background information only.

For each executable program to be tested, a 'TextTest application' needs to be created to tell it what to run. To do this for the first time, just run texttest.py, providing the --new option if there are already tests existing in the place you've designated as TEXTTEST_HOME. If it's set up as above you can just run "texttest.py".

A dialog will then come up where you can tell it about your application. You need to pick a full name for use in reports, and also a short file extension which will be used by TextTest for all files relevant to that application. It can be useful to select a subdirectory (if you write a non-existent name it will be created) to aid with organising tests for different applications in the future. In the case of the course material it's useful to do this so that the tests end up with the program we're testing. Finally, of course, browse your file system and identify the executable program that will be tested (your hello world program), which is under "ex1_hello" for the course material. The dialog should look like this just before you OK it:

You now have an application with no tests. This is the static, or test management GUI. On the left you see a tree view of all tests and test suites that there are. The single line shown is the 'root test suite for the application', created by default, currently containing no tests.

On the right, we have a couple of tabs. The one shown has various options for selecting tests: not very useful when we don't have any. The other “Config” will allow us to view and edit the config file we just created.

To create a test, we first select the root test suite where we wish to add it, by single-clicking that line on the left. This brings up a “Test” tab on the right, which in turn shows us the files contained in the viewed test/suite (currently suite). There is just one, “testsuite.hello”, which defines which tests are contained in the suite. We can then bring up the popup menu by right clicking the same line, which should look like this:

We then select "Add Test", which brings up a dialog for adding a new test. We enter a test name and a brief description of what the test is for, and click the 'OK' button at the bottom. This creates a test and automatically views it:

We now have an 'empty test' under the root test suite (called 'Basic' above). As can be seen, there are no 'approved files' yet, because we have not yet said what the test should produce. We could create these files by hand, but the easiest way is to run the test and see what happens.

We click the “Run” button on the toolbar to run the selected tests. This starts the "dynamic GUI" in a new window, which performs test runs. The test fails, because no approved results are yet defined. On the left we see a tree view similar to the one above, on the right a summary of which files are different in the test.

It collected the standard error and standard output of the process into 'stderr.hello' and 'stdout.hello' files. These can be viewed by double-clicking in the file view, or a summary is available in the 'Text Info' window. We can see that the text 'Hello world' appeared on standard output, while nothing was written to standard error. We like this behaviour, so we click 'Approve' on the toolbar.

Now the test goes green and the produced files are saved as the approved versions. By default, TextTest assumes that succeeded and approved tests are not interesting and hence collapses the suite containing it and removes the Test tab again, showing instead the Status tab which summarises the status of all the tests. We can now exit the dynamic GUI, pressing 'Quit'. When we look in the static GUI, which has been there all along, we now see this.

The files produced by the dynamic GUI run have been stored as 'Approved Files' and will now be used as comparison in the next test run (which we would expect to go green immediately).

So there it is: your first working, repeatable test for “hello world”. Now for testing a real program: what do I still need to know?

One option is of course to work through the course material which gives you a series of increasingly complicated programs to try and test. Failing that, a potted summary of the most basic TextTest features follows.

One of the most immediate challenges is often that real programs write output that changes from run to run, such as temporary file names, process IDs, times etc. TextTest allows you to define what such statements looks like in your program so that it can filter them out, avoiding false failures when only such information changes. To see how to do this, look at the section on run-dependent text.

Another challenge is that you may well need to provide test data to your application, which may also be changed by the tests. As we saw above, TextTest creates a specific temporary directory for each test run, and its model is that all needed data files are provided there and the application is configured so that it only writes files there. This directory is known as the TextTest sandbox. One very common usage of this mechanism is to configure your application's logging for the tests, by providing log4x-style configuration files as test data : this is documented as an example on the same page.

It's also the case that real programs often read and write files other than standard error and output. You may want also want TextTest to keep track of this, and maybe also to compare them in the same way as you do for standard output and error. See the section on collating files for details.

At this point you should be able to get going with building a test suite for your application. There is of course more to TextTest than this, other features are linked from the table provided above.