Speaker
Description
For over 20 years, the Gaudi framework has been used by major HEP experiments, including the LHCb and ATLAS collaborations on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) but also in the Future Circular Collider (FCC) studies. Testing mechanisms have been present almost from the beginning of the framework, but the number of applications and the corresponding amount of code to validate have increased significantly since then. Besides, the current technologies in place are oriented toward the use of integration tests, which are run in a Continuous Integration (CI) pipeline whenever code is pushed to a repository, as well as on a nightly basis. This structural bias results in three major issues: An increased complexity for developers seeking to validate their algorithms, the existence of redundant integration tests, and the misuse of computational resources.
We define a three-phase approach to tackle these problems. This paper presents a new tool that aims to enable unit testing in the Gaudi framework and applications that rely on it, while being compatible with the current integration-based testing paradigm. This tool allows users to split existing integration tests into independent sections of varying sizes, including at the unit level, ensuring they can run without any other algorithms and services. It also paves the way for a second phase, which will consist in an analysis of the level of redundancy in the current suite of tests in the LHCb experiment.