First, an introduction

My name is Patrick Johnmeyer, and I have been a user of UnitTest++ in my day job and side projects for the past 5 years. You may have seen some activity from me on the SourceForge mailing list or the SourceForge / Google Code project pages in the past. I first discovered UnitTest++ when my team was evaluating C++ test frameworks in 2007, and we chose it for its ease of use, and its speed at both build-time and run-time. It was with great pleasure, then, that I accepted a role as maintainer in December 2012.

But enough about me, let’s get to the meat of things.

What is behind us

If you go to the milestone 1.5.0 issue list, you can see what has been finished and what is still open. The goal of milestone 1.5.0 is to produce a nearly drop-in experience for those updating from 1.4 or from Google Code, while bringing the two code-bases together. I say nearly because the two development lines are incompatible in one regard, namely the locations and names of certain files.

There are a handful of long-standing bugs, and a couple of enhancements that I felt it was high time to incorporate in the main code-base; these are mostly taken care of. The CMake and autobuild support you will find here are unique to the GitHub edition, and were contributed by @paleozogt and @qdii respectively.

What is coming up

The primary tasks remaining before I am prepared to call the GitHub project “stable” include completing the rehosting and updating of all documentation to GitHub, and the testing of all project-supported environments. This is not to say that you cannot use UnitTest++ now – far from it. All it really means is that a few things may still end up shifting around in the near future. When this is all done, we will tag a version 1.5.0.

Also on the short-list is determining the right method for discussing UnitTest++. As of now the SourceForge mailing list or the GitHub issues remain the place to have discussion, but I would expect the mailing list to be deprecated at some point.

What is around the bend

Once 1.5.0 is lying flat, our near-term goals will be as follows:

  • Create an add-on model: Now that UnitTest++ is an ‘organization’ on GitHub, there exists a nice central landing place for additional repositories that expand on the UnitTest++ core. Users have been asking for a ‘contrib’ area for a long while, and now we have it. Obviously people are free to publish their extras whereever they like, but if we do this right this will be where they want to publish them.

  • Gather the sheep back to the fold: There are several “forks” of UnitTest++ all about the internet, including on GitHub (not forked from the now-official GitHub repo, mind you) and BitBucket. It is my intent to reach out to as many of these people as I can track down to see what we can do to meet their needs, and get their contributions back into the main project (or an add-on).

  • StackOverflow sweep: With StackOverflow being the source of half of development documentation according to one study, it stands to reason that double-checking the accuracy of content regarding UnitTest++ is of value.

What isn’t around the bend

Lest you be be concerned, rest assured that the core functionality of UnitTest++ will always remain light-weight and simple (as long as I have any say in the matter). The goals of simplicity, portability, speed, and small footprint remain the charter of this test framework.

~-- pj --~