Running tests faster..

[Harald Sitter]

On Tue, May 15, 2012 at 6:42 PM, David Faure <faure at kde.org> wrote:
> On Sunday 13 May 2012 00:04:43 Alexander Neundorf wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> just a quick hint, maybe you don't know this yet:
>>
>> You can run tests using "make test".
>> This will run test by test after each other.
>> Internally this simply calls ctest.
>>
>> If you call ctest manually, you can use extra command line options, and, it
>> supports -jN, as make does.
>>
>> So, if you have 4 cores, run
>> ctest -j4
>> to have it execute 4 tests in parallel and save time this way.
>
> Save time...  but at the expense of more failures, if the tests aren't ready
> for this ;-)
>
> E.g. in kdelibs I get 3 more failures, due to ksycoca-related tests creating
> and removing services that show up in other tests' queries, or other tests
> reading and writing from the same shared files.
> Any shared resource makes this impossible, but it's interesting to keep in
> mind for the design of future unit tests.

TBH, a test that depends on another test sounds like a bad test and
should be fix. I am certain Kent Beck agrees ;)

HS