Kurs om
Google Test/Mock, Benchmark, Coverage

What is a Unit Test?

• Why do we write bugs?
• It's not always about bugs
• Time to market
• Cost of fixing bugs
• Eric Gamma & Kent Beck
• What is a unit test?
• Other forms of tests
• Structure of a unit test
• Check one aspect at a time
• The acronym F.I.R.S.T.
• Brief about test-driven development (TDD)

Google Test

In this first section we cover Google Test completely, including how to install GTest & GMock (part of same repo) and matchers (part of GMock).

Installation of GTest & GMock

• Overview of the package
• GitHub repo
• Steps and alternatives to install it
• (a) Download and build it yourself
• GTest directories
• How to compile a test executable
• Global installation
• Simple CMake file to locate GTest
• (b) Let CMake download and build it for you
• Using FetchContent
• A very simple unit test
• Test runner driver
• User-defined test driver
• Exercise: Use CMake to download GTest and write a simple test

Test Functions

• GTest is based on CPP macros
• The TEST(group, name) macro
• Generated function, as shown by nm
• How to inspect generated sources
• Failing a check, how it looks like
• Expectations vs. Assertions
• Failing a set of expections
• Failing a set of assertions
• Boolean checks
• Relational checks
• Exercise: Write tests for a simple Person class

More about Checks

• Checks fo native strings (C string)
• Comparing C++ strings vs. C strings
• Floating-point checks
• Floating-point operations - problems to be aware of
• Floating-point checks
• Custom error messages
• Predicate checks
• Sample predicate checks
• Explicit failure or success
• Usage of ADD_FAILURE()
• Printing values
• Exercise: C-style upper-case function
• Exercise: Approximate sin(x)
• Exercise: Character-unit palindrome

Matchers

• What is a matcher?
• How to use matchers
• Build instructions
• Basic usage of EXPECT_THAT()
• Relational matchers
• Matchers for primitive expressions
• Text matchers
• Regex matchers
• Floating-point matchers
• Composition matchers
• Container matchers
• Class/struct member matchers
• User-defined matchers
• Exercise: Rewrite your previous test, now using matchers instead

Failure Tests

• What is a failure test?
• Exception tests
• Checking for a thrown exception
• Checking for the wrong exception
• How to check for abnormal program termination
• Death test checks
• Death test predicates
• Checking for exit code
• Checking for internal signals
• Checking for null-pointer termination (SEGV)
• Checking for division by zero termination (FPE)
• Checking for invalid call to delete termination (ABRT)
• Failed death test
• Exercise: Implement and test factorial (n!), that throws fdor negative arguments
• Exercise: Implement and test factorial (n!), that terminates the program

Test Data & Life-Cycle Functions

• What is test-data?
• Using a fixture class
• Life-cycle methods
• Before/after every test-case
• Before/after a test-group
• Before/after a test-suite
• (a) Implement testing::Environment using a global variable
• (b) Implement testing::Environment using your own main()
• Showing all life-cycle methods in one program
• Exercise: Implement an write tests for a word count program that read text files

Value-Parameterized Tests

• What is a Value-Parameterized Test?
• How to create a value-parameterized test
• Value generators
• Value from a container
• Values from a numeric range
• Boolean values
• How to combine parameters with expected result
• Advanced value generators
• Cartesian product tuple values
• User-defined value generators
• Exercise: Implement and write tests for a left padding function

Type-Parameterized Tests

• What is a Type-Parameterized Test?
• How to create a type-parameterized test
• Target container with regular test
• Type fixture and type parameters
• Test macro functions
• Exercise: Complete the provided test suite

Command-Line Usage

• Running GTest on the command-line
• Selecting tests
• Sample filters
• Repeated tests
• Disabled tests
• Skipping elapsed time
• Skipping coloured lines
• Generate XML reports for post-processing
• Exercise: Investigate various CLI options, using your own tests

Mock Objects

In this section we cover the mock objects part of the GTest/GMock repo.

Test Doubles Terminology

• What is and why do we need test doubles?
• Test double types
• Stub
• Spy
• Fake
• Mock

Using GMock

• Brief about installation
• Prerequisites on the target system
• Sample C++ interface
• Test-target system
• Test-target method
• How to generate a mock class
• Sample mock class
• A minimal unit test
• Default behaviour of a mock object
• How to hide "Uninteresting" warning printouts, using NiceMock<>
• How to do the opposite with StrictMock<>
• Be aware of limitations of the pre-processor (CPP)
• How to compensate for the CPP parsing limitation
• How to specify expected behaviour of mocked methods
• Simple configuration
• Argument matchers
• Return values
• Actions
• Invocation cardinality
• Cardinality failures
• Exercise: Write mock tests for the provided ATM system

Other Testing Frameworks

• Catch2, version 3
• Doctest
• CppUnit
• List of C/C++ testing frameworks

Benchmarking

In this section we cover Google Benchmark, which related by still a separate framework from GTest/GMock. With GBench you can write micro-benchmarks to keep track of performance for time-critical functions in your system or to compare different implementations of the same functionality.

What is Benchmarking?

• Benchmarking - a definition
• Benchmarking - a motivation
• Types of benchmarks
• Benchmarking metrics
• Benchmarking tactics
• Pitfalls to be aware of
• A very simple benchmark
• Shortcomings of this implementation
• A slightly less simple benchmark
• The benchmark() function
• The warmup() function
• The measure() function
• Shortcomings of the second implementation
• Exercise: Implement the second version and populate a std::vector<unsigned long>

Installation of Google Benchmark

• The GitHub repo of GBench
• Ways of installing GBench
• (a) Using FetchContent in CMake
• Sample JetBrains CLion setup
• (b) Download and build it yourself
• (1-2) Download & unpack
• (3-5) Build & install
• (6) Usage of find_package() in CMake
• (7) How to compile on the command-line
• Sample simple benchmark
• Exercise: Reimplement your previous benchmark, using GBench

Basic Usage of GBench

• Benchmark function(s)
• Registration of a measurement function
• How to provide the main() function
• What happens if you don't prevent compiler optimizations?
• Marking the variable as volatile
• Marking the variable with DoNotOptimize()
• What does DoNotOptimize() do?
• What is clobbering the memory?
• Using ClobberMemory()
• Excluding timings for a code snippet
• Comparative benchmarking
• Sample comparative benchmark
• Exercise: Benchmark std::sort()

Command-Line Usage of GBench

• Getting help info
• CLI <--> ENV
• Double-check the documentation, because not all is up-to-date
• Setting verbosity level
• Setting the time unit
• Available output formats
• The console format
• Data --> stdout and context --> stderr
• The json format
• The csv format
• Adding extra context as key=value pairs
• Sending data to an output file
• Re-run a subset of a benchmark suite
• Repeatedly re-run a benchmark
• Mixed output of results and stats
• How to suppress the individual result rows
• Aggregates to stdout, but full report to file
• Exercise: Investigating the command-line options

Benchmark Arguments

• Change of time unit
• Benchmark arguments forms
• Explicit arguments with Arg()
• Sparse range arguments with Range()
• Change of multiplicator with RangeMultiplicator()
• Dense range arguments with DenseRange()
• Composite arguments
• Composite arguments range
• Cartesian product of arguments
• Cartesian product of arguments, with generators
• Arbitrary arguments
• Sample usage of a parameter pack function
• Lice-cycle functions
• Setup & teardown hooks
• Fixtures
• User-defined counters
• Exercise: Investigate std::sort() with various collection sizes
• Exercise: Write a benchmark the reads a file using the provided WordIterator and finds the shortest and longest words

Coverage

In this section we cover the topic of test coverage, which involves instrumenting the test executable in compile-time and running various aggregating tools to produce a coverage report.

What is Test Coverage?

• What do we mean with coverage?
• What is its purpose?
• Types of test coverage
• Function coverage
• Line coverage
• Branch coverage
• Path coverage
• What are the benefits of high coverage percentage?
• Setting realistic coverage goals
• Common misconceptions of test coverage

Using GCOV

• Capturing tools for GCC
• How to compile with instrumentation
• What does option --coverage do?
• Files generated during compilation
• File generated - an overview
• Simple single-file project - source code
• Simple single-file project - commands
• Simple single-file project - output
• Coverage of project with several files
• Simple multi-file project - class Person
• Simple multi-file project - person generator
• Simple multi-file project - person app
• Simple multi-file project - build.sh
• Simple multi-file project - running the build
• Simple multi-file project - sample output *.gcov files
• Setting coloured lines
• Exercise: Generate coverage for the person app

Usijng LCOV

• What is LCOV?
• Installation of LCOV
• How to download and build LCOV
• Basic usage of this tool
• Simple multi-file and multi-folder project
• File structure
• Application build
• Application run
• Basic usage of program lcov
• Contens of *.info files
• Sources processed by lcov
• How to include just your project files - i.e., exclude stdlib++
• Basic invocation of lcov
• Reduce the log output
• Basic usage of program genhtml
• How to open an HTML file from the command-line or a shell script
• Using wslview
• Sumamry of running lcov and genhtml
• Remarks about the report HTML & CSS
• Exercise: Perform coverage of the project Just RESTing

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29 okt. 2025 26 nov. 2025 8 dec. 2025