Test harnesses

Objective

Given the scientific nature of the software, testing against all requirements and testing with nominal, boundary case as well as invalid input data is infeasible.

The test harnesses should verify that for nominal input data the programs produce sensible results, and that special cases are properly dealt with.

With such a test harness we can ensure that changes in one part of the software do not corrupt the functionality of other parts of the system.

Guidelines

• check run-to-completion.
• check whether the output data is valid (e.g. within a specified range).
• check some of the values in the output to see whether they are correct (e.g. whether a source is detected where it was put in the first place; whether a sorted vector is really sorted).
• when the task should explicitly be able to handle special cases, test whether the special cases are dealt with properly.