Unit Testing

As the name implies, a unit test concentrates on verifying a single unit of a system in isolation. If each unit performs as specified and the specification is correct, then the entire system should also be correct.

Unit tests are designed to give pass/fail results, and only report when a failure occurs. This makes them easily scriptable; during development, tests involved with a modified component can be run on every compile. The entire suite can be run nightly.

Multistage is currently undergoing a retrofit to bring its unit tests up to date, using the excellent junit framework. However, certain systems involving complex network interaction cannot easily be tested unit-wise; these require the more comprehensive testing that integrated and automated testing can provide.

There are (or will be) ant targets for the various suites of unit tests. Simply run them with ant or use the provided scripts in the multistage/bin subdirectory.