Disttest

What is Disttest?

Disttest is a distributed unittest runner for POSIX platforms. The tests can be written in any language and are run in parallel on several slave nodes, thus reducing the wall-clock time it takes to run all the tests.

What is Disttest Not?

Disttest is not a unittesting framework such as JUnit. The idea is that software development as a discipline should separate building the program, building the tests in a testing framework and actually running the tests from each other. Disttest handles only the last part.

Why Disttest?

Since disttest offloads the work of running unittests to several computers, you will notice an (almost) linear speed increase in running tests. As an example, in one of our projects we have 359 tests which take 462 seconds to run on one computer. With disttest and 9 slave nodes (8 + the master node), the tests are run in 54 seconds, a 8.5x speedup. This frees up time for more productive work than waiting for test results.

Requirements

The following is required for successfully running disttest:

• Disttest must be installed on the master node and all slave nodes.
• SSH and the SSH daemons must be configured to let the user in on every slave node without asking for a password or passphrase.
• All slave nodes must have a common filesystem with the master node for the developer's project.
• All slave nodes must have a similar environment as the master node in which the program and the tests were built. This means libraries and such must be available in the same location in the filesystem on all nodes. Processor speeds can differ.

Documentation

man disttest

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Contact

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