CSpec: Behaviour-driven development in C

Overview

CSpec is a Behaviour-driven Development (http://behaviour-driven.org/) framework for C. It provides a spec framework for describing the behavior of the functions of your system. The syntax is inspired from RSpec (http://rspec.info/) to be as legible as possible. The source code is as portable and as light as possible to make it easy to run the library on embedded devices.

Documentation

CSpec is mostly based on the macros defined in cspec.h . The macros can be differentiated in two groups: structural macros that define the structure of the specification and expectation macros that describe the tests to be evaluated.

Writing the spec of a function is quite straightforward: - Enclose your spec in between the macros DESCRIBE and END_DESCRIBE with function name and caption - Enclose each part of the spec between the macros IT and END_IT with the caption - For each part of the specification, the tests should be evaluated with one of the expectation macros

That's it. Your specification is ready to be run.

Running a spec is done by calling CSpec_Run with the spec name (using macro DESCRIPTION) and selecting an output type.

There are currently 4 basic outputs provided in CSpec: - OutputVerbose : provides much information as possible: captions, evaluated tests and results - OutputUnit : provides less information, concentrated more one the number of failed tests (similar to unit tests) - OutputHeader : provides information that does not depend on the tests result and can be used as function header - OutputXML : provides verbose information in XML format

It is easy to define other outputs depending on your needs and platform constraints. TODO: explain how to make new output.

Spec framework sample

There are 2 samples provided with the library. They are located in directories sample and sample_skip. sample contains the specifications of 2 functions from the C library and is the place to check first because of its simplicity. sample_skip specifies a skip list library and therefore is a small proof of concept for CSpec.

Future & ideas

• Put in place a story framework
• Check how to mock
• Automake autoconf

Compile and link

• Windows : directory VC contains VC++ 6.0 dsw and dsp files to compile and link the library and the sample
• OS X /Linux : run autogen.sh

Links

http://behaviour-driven.org/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavior_Driven_Development http://dannorth.net/introducing-bdd http://dannorth.net/whats-in-a-story http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-cq09187/index.html

Arnaud Brejeon arnaud.brejeon@laposte.net

Toshiyuki Kawanishi toshi.kawanishi@gmail.com

Erkki Moorits erkki.moorits@mail.ee