Abstract Framework for Testing

AFT is a toolkit for automated testing. The core logic of defining and executing automated tests is abstracted from any underlying specifics, such as platform, database, transport, etc. AFT includes a plug-in architecture to apply testing to specific environments. An emulator can be plugged in for most components.

The primary intended usage of AFT is for system testing. It is most convienent when inserted into a system of interconnected components (processes) and emulates one or more of these components. It is used for testing running components and sub-systems.

AFT is not intented as a unit test framework (for C++). There are many good C++ unit test frameworks such as googletest, cppunit and cxxunit. This project uses googletest for unit testing the various AFT C++ classes.

The main library and functionality relies on very few dependencies:

• g++
• GNU make

The unit tests depend on googletest, but these are optional and can be removed from default 'make' targets.

The plugin directory and specific UI tools will have additional dependencies, as needed.

The AFT Makefile structure is very minimal (read "primitive"). Will probably switch to cmake when the project's structure gets more complex.

An xcode workspace is in the aft/macosx folder that contains the following xcode projects:

• libaft Builds the static library.
• libafttests Builds unit/module test programs. The test programs depend on googletest so the project searches for headers in /opt/local/include. You need to copy libgtest.a to the aft/lib folder. Or modify the project if you have installed googletest elsewhere.
• examples Builds example programs that illustrate using the AFT framework.

Any platform that supports POSIX, g++ and the c++14 standard should compile and run without problems. But any errors that may arise should be isolated to classes within osdep. Currently the osdep section is only involved in the UI, threads and dynamic librarires, but more could be added in the future.

This project is a rethink of ipctest (a previous testing tool project) whose original goal was UI abstraction. While implementing ipctest I realized that almost all of the other components could be similarly abstracted, thus making the tool much more useful. This project also draws from previous testing tools that I have written in C++ and one in Java.

Maybe another day . . .

OK a little: I have written several automated testing tools for various projects. Each of these ran only on a specific plaform, fixed transport, data formats, etc. But in each case the actual logic of defining, recording and executing test cases was generally the same.

A UI can be constructed to allow easy input of steps that are added, edited, executed, saved, restored, debugged, etc. These are expressed as test suites and test cases.

The AFT package is licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0.