[Dune-devel] Regarding GSoC 2013

[Christian Engwer]

Hi Elena,

> My name is Elena Petrevska, and I am interested in Project 4, i.e. "*Add
> Performance Testing to DUNE*".
> I am a student at Hochschule Mannheim in Germany, studying Automation
> Technology (Automatisierungstechnik) and currently enrolled in the second
> semester of my studies.

great to here this :-)

> Still, I think there is much more to be experimented and discovered than
> the time allows. That's the reason why, I would be really thankful if
> someone gives me some hints of what to concentrate on regarding the "*Add
> Performance Testing to DUNE*" Project, and what to do in order to become
> familiar with the Unit Tests and System Test that should be implemented for
> testing the software.

we are currently using the automake test system to handle our
tests. automake allows to specify applications to run as tests. These
applications (and some further tests) are also run for our automated
tests. Sadly the automated tests are currently in no good shape, but
everybody can run the tests in his/her dune-src tree via the "make
check" target.

We currently do several different kind of tests:
 - unit tests:
   test apps with hand-written unit test, no particular unit-test
   library is used
   (run via make check)
 - buildsystem tests:
   we have some minimal checks to ensure that all src files are
   handled in the tar-balls and in the installation
   (run via make sourcescheck)
 - src consitency check:
   headers should be self contained, thus we can test that every
   header is in a shape that allows to compile it, especially this
   means that all required headers are included. Some headers are not
   intended as "interface" headers, so we can exclude these from the
   test.
   (run via make headercheck)
 - system tests:
   System tests allow to check the interplay of all components. This
   is work in a relatively early stage. It is only available for
   dune-pdelab and requires to write bigger
   test-applications. Success/failure is detected by a fuzzy
   comparison with reference data or reference logs.

The architecture of the autobuild system is shortly described in
doc/overview.tex in the dune-autobuild repo https://svn.dune-project.org/svn/dune-autobuild/

I hopy this gives some first starting points. Feel free to ask further
questions. I'll try to update the project description soon and add
more details.

> [*1*] https://live.gnome.org/GnomeWomen/OutreachProgram2012

I remember having read some of your posts last year.

Cheers Christian

-- 
Prof. Dr. Christian Engwer 
Institut für Numerische und Angewandte Mathematik
Fachbereich Mathematik und Informatik der Universität Münster
Einsteinstrasse 62
48149 Münster

E-Mail	christian.engwer at uni-muenster.de
Telefon	+49 251 83-35067
FAX		+49 251 83-32729