In my CodeRage presentation last year, I demonstrated a framework for semi-automatically building unit tests of Delphi components. I left the project very much in an alpha state, and haven’t had time to return to it, as other things are taking up my time recently. I still think, however, that the concept of automatically generating test cases is a good one.
So I’d like to note another project which uses the same general concept in a very different manner. OpenCTF is a free framework which generates DUnit test cases by looking for certain "known" errors in arbitrary components.
Delphi’s relatively limited introspection/RTTI features restrict how far you can go with projects like this. It’s really only possible to automatically test published properties and published methods with known signatures. Likewise, most of the Delphi-aware automated testing tools require that you change your application to include special testing interfaces in order to get full functionality from the tool. One of the benefits of enhanced RTTI in the future would be more options for automated testing.
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