Objective

The objective of this page is to establish architectural best practices for TopCoder component testing, including unit and reviewer tests, to be reflected in future components and to be factored into existing components.

Status

Request

Requirements

Before establishing specific best practices, it is necessary to determine the requirements to be satisfied by the components testing capabilities that meet those best practices. Only in that context can the recommended practices be appropriately evaluated. This section explains the requirements that the best practices aim to satisfy.

100% Test Automation

Maintenance of Test Code

Testing by Contract

Simplicity

Multiple Uses of Test Code as Internal Unit, External Unit, Regression and Integration

Test Coverage

Use of tools such as nCover and Cobertura to ensure the unit tests are adequately excercising the underlying source code.

Current standard is for 85% test coverage.

Recommendations

This document recommends both a high-level architectural structure for components to follow in their testing approach, and detailed discussion of how to adapt those structure to specific corner cases. It is strongly recommended that components follow these guidelines in their design and their test implementation to ensure long term viability of the test code and the component itself.

Use of Mocks

Interfaces

100% Unit Code Rampup

Dealing with ...

Open issues

Definitions