Upcoming Ahven Roadmap
Here is a small status update about Ahven, my unit testing framework for Ada 95.
In 2012, Ahven got only one release. this is mostly because it was put in the maintenance mode while I concentraceted on other projects, like AVR-Ada.
I do have plans to put more effort to Ahven development in 2013. For example, a new release is planned for January.
In addition, I am looking for ways to reduce costs related to Ahven's web site maintenance, and also simplify it a little more.
Currently, Ahven's infrastructure is scattered to three different places:
- Downloadable files at Sourceforge
- Source code repository, bug tracker, and wiki at Bitbucket
- Actual website on one Linode instance
Most likely I'll move downloads to Bitbucket and change the web site to a cheaper shared web hosting service.
What comes to actual new features, Ahven 2.3 will include support for exception backtraces when an unknown exception is raised. Support for the backtraces is compiler dependant and at the moment Janus/Ada offers the "prettiest" backtraces. You also get something with GNAT and Irvine ICCAda, but usefulness might vary.
Other feature, which I have under work, is parallel execution of the tests. The idea is to run the tests concurrently in N tasks, where N is something between 1 and the maximum number of the tests. However, the feature adds quite lot of code to Ahven and makes some not so simple changes into the internals of Ahven, so I am not sure yet, should I integrate the feature at all.
I have also considered adding system tests for Ahven. Now, Ahven is tested only by unit tests ran by the framework itself. While it gives you some amount of test coverage, even a small suite of system tests would be nice. Only problem is finding an easy to use framework for the tests. So far, I have tried Test::Simple (Perl), py-test (Python) and cram (framework in Python, tests as shell scripts). cram looks the most promising, but py-test is not bad either.
And as always, if you have a patch or idea to submit, please contact me (tero.koskinen@iki.fi). The source code can be found from Bitbucket.