Speaker
A. Undrus
(BROOKHAVEN NATIONAL LABORATORY, USA)
Description
Software testing is a difficult, time-consuming process that
requires technical sophistication and proper planning. This
is especially true for the large-scale software projects of
High Energy Physics where constant modifications and
enhancements are typical. The automated nightly testing is
the important component of NICOS, NIghtly COntrol System,
that manages the multi-platform nightly builds based on the
recent versions of software packages. It facilitates collective
work in collaborative environment and provides four benefits
to developers: repeatability (tests can be executed more than
once), accumulation (results are stored and reflected on
NICOS web pages), feedback (automatic e-mail notifications
about test failures), user friendly setup (configuration
parameters can be encrypted in the body of test scripts).
The modular structure of NICOS allows plugging in other
validation and organization tools, such as QMTest
and CppUNIT. NICOS classifies tests according to their
granularity level and purpose. The low level structural tests
reveal compilation problems, inconsistencies in package
configuration, such as circular dependencies, and simple
isolated bugs. The results for these three groups of tests are
published for each package of the software project. The
integrated (or behavioral) tests find bugs at levels of users
scenarios and NICOS generates the special web page with
their results. The NICOS tool is currently used to coordinate
the efforts of more than 100 developers for the ATLAS
project at CERN and included in the tool library of the LHC
computing proje
Primary author
A. Undrus
(BROOKHAVEN NATIONAL LABORATORY, USA)
