TestML User Manual

Welcome to TestML. This manual describes what TestML is, why and when you would use it, and how it works. Enjoy!


This documentation is in progress and reflects the current thinking for the eventual release of TestML 1.0.

Introduction to TestML

TestML is a meta language for writing software tests. When you write a corpus of TestML documents, you are in effect describing how the software should behave under various conditions. The conditions are expressed as human friendly and readable data points. Then you describe how that data should be manipulated against the application being developed/tested, and finally what assertions should hold true after all the transformation has occurred.

The test descriptions in TestML documents do not

Use Cases

This section descibes specific use cases for TestML.

Internal Processing

TestML is an abstract language. This section describes in very specific terms, how the abstract is applied to reality. In other words, when you run a TestML test, what actually happens.

Document Processing

Every TestML test run by a particular implementation's test harness calls a runner method with a specific TestML document and an associated bridge class. The runner parses the document and then invokes the runtime process on it.

When a TestML document has been parsed, it is turned into an in-memory representation of the document and all its referenced parts. The document object contains 3 main parts, a meta object, a test program AST object, and a data object.

The meta object is just a simple mapping of TestML settings to their values. The meta section is used by the parser for information on how to parse the TestML document and turn it into a document object.

The test program AST object is the compiled form the test code from the TestML document. It is run by the runtime against the data in the data object.

The data object contains all the compiled data from both the inline data section and any referenced external data files.

Data Object Model

The data object can be thought of as a sequence (or list or array) of labeled mappings (or hashes or dictionaries). The mappings are called data blocks. All of the keys of the blocks are ASCII identifier words and all the values are unicode strings.

Each of the separate data sections (from multiple sources) that are parsed, produce a sequence of mappings. The sequences are simply concatenated into one sequence in the data object.

The data object has methods for iterating over its contents.

The TestML Runtime Sequence

The runtime execution of TestML is somewhat complex despite the simplicity of its testing syntax. This section describes exactly what is happening when a given testml command is executed.

Suppose you have the following testml document:

    testml: 1.0
    input.some_process() == output;
    input: xxx
    output: yyy
    input: zzz
    nonsense: qwerty
    input: abc
    output: def

The program test code here is:

    input.some_process() == output;

It looks at all the data blocks that have both input and output data points, runs each input through the bridge method some_process and compares it to the corresponding output.

In effect, this is what happens, but the actual steps to make that happen are much more involved.

The Data Block Set

Every test command has a set containing zero or more data blocks. In this case, the set contains two blocks (the ones with both input and output points).

When a command is compiled the AST contains a list of all the referenced data points. The data block set consists of all the defined data blocks that contain each of the referenced data points.

A command is run once for each data block in the set associated with that command.

In our case the command can be thought of as:

    block.input.some_process() == block.output;

Where block is the current data block that the test is being run against. The current block is known as the ``topic''.

    topic().input.some_process() == topic().output;
The Current Value

The topic block is an object which has a current value. The value starts off undefined and then is set to the return value of each transform. Transforms names with no parentheses after them, simply set the topic value to the value of the named data point.

    topic().point_value('input').some_process() ==

If point_value returns the value of the named data point, then it would set the value of the topic by definition.

Transform Function Calling Convention

Each transform in an expression sequence, is passed the topic object followed by all the parenthesized arguments. The topic object can be used to access all the information in the test environment. If the function just wants the current topic value, it calls the value method on the topic object.

Again, whatever value the transform function returns, that value is set as the topic object current value.

Comparison Method

The '==' operator is really just visual sugar for the .equals comparison method.


It is the equals function that actually runs the test. It gets two different block objects passed to it, which in reality are the topics of two different expressions. Each topic has a value and those two values are unicode strings which are compared for equality.

In reality, those values are passed to the Runner object, which runs the appropriate test code for the particular test environment in which everything is being run.





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