On Friday, March 23, 2018 13:43:15 H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d-announce wrote: > Yep. As I mentioned elsewhere, recently I've had to resort to external > testing for one of my projects, and I'm still working on that right now. > And already, I'm seeing a liability: rather than quickly locating a > unittest immediately following a particular function, now I have to > remember "oh which subdirectory was it that the tests were put in? and > which file was it that a particular test of this function was done?". > It's an additional mental burden to have to keep doing the mapping > between current source location <-> test code location (even if it's a > 1-to-1 mapping), and a physical burden to have to continually open > external files (and typing a potentially long path for them) rather than > just "bookmark, jump to end of function, navigate unittest blocks" in > the same file.
When I've done unit testing in C++, I've had the tests in separate files, and when I do that, I usually put all of the test files in the same place (e.g. include/ for the .h files, source/ for the .cpp files and tests/ for the .h and .cpp files with the tests) and have a 1-to-1 relationship between the .h/.cpp pair containing the code and the .h/.cpp pair containing the tests. Also, the test functions are usually named after the function that they're testing. So, it's all fairly organized, but it's still way more of a pain than just having the unittest block right after the function being tested, and it makes it easy for folks to just ignore the tests and easy for you to miss that something wasn't tested. Having dealt with both that and putting all of the unit tests next to stuff in D, I find having the tests right after the functions to be _far_ more maintainable. In fact, in std.datetime.interval, most of the tests are outside the templated types that they're testing in order to avoid having the tests included in every template instantiation, and that's turned out to be _way_ more of a pain to maintain than having the tests right after the functions. And that doesn't even involve a separate file. Obviously, YMMV, but in my experience, having the tests _immediately_ after what they're testing is vastly more maintainable than having the tests elsewhere. - Jonathan M Davis
