# 1. Introduction

This is a short guide for using the AUnit test framework. AUnit is an adaptation of the Java JUnit (Kent Beck, Erich Gamma) and C++ CppUnit (M. Feathers, J. Lacoste, E. Sommerlade, B. Lepilleur, B. Bakker, S. Robbins) unit test frameworks for Ada code.

## 1.1. What’s new in AUnit 3

AUnit 3 brings several enhancements over AUnit 2 and AUnit 1:

- Removal of the genericity of the AUnit framework, making the AUnit 3 API as close as possible to AUnit 1.

- Emulates dynamic memory management for limited run-time profiles.

- Provides a new XML reporter, and changes harness invocation to support easy switching among text, XML and customized reporters.

- Provides new tagged types `Simple_Test_Case`, `Test_Fixture` and `Test_Caller` that correspond to CppUnit’s `TestCase`, `TestFixture` and `TestCaller` classes.

- Emulates exception propagation for restricted run-time profiles (e.g. ZFP), by using the gcc builtin setjmp / longjmp mechanism.

- Reports the source location of an error when possible.

## 1.2. Typographic conventions

For notational convenience, <version> will be used throughout this document to stand for the AUnit product version number. For example, aunit-<version>-src expands to aunit-0.0-src.

## 1.3. Examples

With this version, we have provided new examples illustrating the enhanced features of the framework. These examples are in the AUnit installation directory: `<aunit-root>/share/examples/aunit`, and are also available in the source distribution `aunit-<version>-src/examples`.

The following examples are provided:

- simple_test: shows use of AUnit.Simple_Test_Cases (see AUnit.Simple_Test_Cases).

- test_caller: shows use of AUnit.Test_Caller (see AUnit.Test_Caller).

- test_fixture: example of a test fixture (see Fixture).

- liskov: This suite tests conformance to the Liskov Substitution Principle of a pair of simple tagged types. (see OOP considerations)

- failures: example of handling and reporting failed tests (see Reporting).

- calculator: a full example of test suite organization.

## 1.4. Note about limited run-time libraries

AUnit allows a great deal of flexibility for the structure of test cases, suites and harnesses. The templates and examples given in this document illustrate how to use AUnit while staying within the constraints of the GNAT Pro restricted and Zero Footprint (ZFP) run-time libraries. Therefore, they avoid the use of dynamic allocation and some other features that would be outside of the profiles corresponding to these libraries. Tests targeted to the full Ada run-time library need not comply with these constraints.

## 1.5. Thanks

This document is adapted from the JUnit and CppUnit Cookbooks documents contained in their respective release packages.

Special thanks to François Brun of Thales Avionics for his ideas about support for OOP testing.