Unit Tests & Test-Driven Development

[virtuald]

What we created for RobotPy users (python interpreter for cRio) is a library called fake-wpilib, which has bare implementations of most of the WPILib objects. You setup some hooks, import the robot code, and call StartCompetition(), and your unit tests have access to see/control everything.

We have implemented separately a tk-based program that allows our students to run their python robot code in a simulator of sorts, and they can drive the robot around and use sensors and such.

If I was re-implementing the test harness again for C++, this is probably how I would go about it. It seems like someone could create a script that could parse the C++ code and automatically create functional shells from that. Tools like SWIG and SIP sorta do that sort of thing, you would just need a mechanism to map function inputs to public variables.