New Unit Test 'Framework' from JKI - Caraya

[Taggart]

First of all, any unit testing is better than none. All of the available tools, work. They just vary in features, complexity, cost, etc.  The chart that Peter linked to is a good start.

My recommendation is don't get too hung up on which one to use. Try them all, then pick the one that makes the most sense to you. You can always change later if you find there is some feature you need that tool doesn't support.

Here are some other resources:

https://automatedenver.com/caraya-review/

https://automatedenver.com/ast-unit-tester-review/

https://automatedenver.com/using-jki-vi-tester/

https://automatedenver.com/insta-coverage/

[Tomi_Maila]

Now that Caraya has been around for a couple of years and most of the bugs have been ironed out and it's more feature complete, I would go with Caraya for all projects. Especially once the 1.0 release is out that @normandinf has been working on. The execution performance of Caraya is much faster than any other unit test framework out there. What I have seen is that developers like writing unit tests for Caraya because of the better user experience. They also like running them often because it's blazingly fast. That means better code coverage in practice because developers write more tests. That also means bugs are detected early on because tests are ran more frequently. So those two factors alone make the case for Caraya.

[bokorpet]

Hi Tomi,

you're right about Caraya being super fast but it's not always easy to use especially in a CI environment. Other tools such as VI Tester and InstaCoverage that may be a better match for CI applications are not so much slower than Caraya. We did a benchmark to compare the execution speed of the various tools: https://github.com/IncQueryLabs/LabVIEW-knowledge-base/wiki/Unit-testing-tools-benchmark-and-DQMH-ex...

You mention test coverage too. Your argument that a fast tool encourages testers which implies higher coverage is an interesting one, although if coverage is a concern I would go for a tool which can measure coverage.

Peter

[felipe.foz]

---

@Tomi_Maila  escreveu:

Now that Caraya has been around for a couple of years and most of the bugs have been ironed out and it's more feature complete, I would go with Caraya for all projects. Especially once the 1.0 release is out that @normandinf has been working on. The execution performance of Caraya is much faster than any other unit test framework out there. What I have seen is that developers like writing unit tests for Caraya because of the better user experience. They also like running them often because it's blazingly fast. That means better code coverage in practice because developers write more tests. That also means bugs are detected early on because tests are ran more frequently. So those two factors alone make the case for Caraya.

---

Hi Tomi, 

I've relatively new to unit testing, and after testing some of the frameworks Caraya got my attention. It is an interesting tool, because you can really switch between very simple tests to more complex tests whenever you desire without so much effort (I mean sometimes a bit but if you follow some design standards, all the test are easily replicable). Also, There is no need of a painful configuration process and a lots of VIs created.
I am looking forward to the stable 1.0 version. I saw the release notes and there are very good improvements. Maybe I'l try the beta release and somehow if possible contribute to the development.

Cheers,

[Jim_Kring]

As Tomi mentioned, we're really close to finishing up the production/stable 1.0 release of Caraya. Actually, there was just one open question about whether to improve the JUnit XML output to show call chains of test VIs to help identify specific failures (in cases where test VIs are reused and called in many times in the full test execution process/hierarchy). Stay tuned!