isolated actor testing

[LVrooky]

Dear Actors-Friends

I'm looking for a methode to test actors during the development time, isolated from the final caller, some nested actor are already available, maybe not all of them. Is there a less time consuming way than implementing a dummy-root-actor that sends all the messages to test and inherits the corresponding interface.class from the actor to test. This dummy-root-actor itself has also to be launched by a launcher VI. And all different actors need some kind of stimulus. Even some parts or ideas of this dummy-root-actor can be reused later when implementing the final root actor, it seems not to be the most efficient way for me.

Does anybody have some tips or does know some helpful documents related that topic?

Thanks for your help

[felipefoz]

Hi,

You can initialize the queues and the actor data, and then send messages to the actor and see if it executes correctly that message.

There are a good explanation in this Allen's presentation, there is probably something newer, but this is a start for what you are looking for.

https://labviewwiki.org/wiki/Americas_CLA_Summit_2019/Test_Driven_Development_in_Actor_Framework

[justACS]

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@felipefoz wrote:

There are a good explanation in this Allen's presentation, there is probably something newer, but this is a start for what you are looking for.

https://labviewwiki.org/wiki/Americas_CLA_Summit_2019/Test_Driven_Development_in_Actor_Framework

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After a minor update, this presentation became the unit testing module in the official AF course, Actor-Oriented Design in LabVIEW.  Other than polish and some demos, the only thing I added was to note that you can often test an actor without launching it, assuming what you're testing doesn't need the actor's core to run.

This is my standard work flow now.  The "new" I would add would be how to build these tests in Carya, since VI Tester is in maintenance.

[LVrooky]

thanks for your feedback. I hope I have understand the common thread of your proposed presentation related the Test-Driven-Development in the AF. Sometimes I get lost in the details of the implementation, it is difficult for me to see what I have to implement by myself, what is supported by the VI Tester or some other frameworks... working with VITester will hopefully help to understand the details.

Anyway, according the received feedback of this topic, I see that the testing of isolated actors is not for free and it's possible to gain efficiency when experienced with some additional tools like VITester.