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How do you test visual programing languages? (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

13 comments fedilink hide all child comments

So how do you guys test visual programming languages? These languages include Labview, Simulink, Snaplogic, Slang, etc. I ask because I'm working on improving the testing suite we use at my job for Snaplogic. The way we currently lest is we have a suite of pipelines that have certain snaps and we just run those pipelines and look for errors in a testing environment every release.

What I'm really trying to figure out is how to run Functional Tests (unit, integration, system) and Non-Functional Tests (security, performance). In a language such as Python this can be straight forward but in a visual language or a service offered by another company then it is a bit more difficult.

I am thinking of creating a custom test suite using the modules used in our pipelines and using Python to generate JSON and SQL data. Does anyone do something similar?

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I think the public that uses those tools usually don't care about standard practices (yet?).

So congrats, you are on the forefront I guess.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 4 months ago

I'm just trying to get a raise bro

[–] [email protected] 12 points 4 months ago

Simulink has a concept called Test Harnesses which are models that isolate individual blocks for testing. The tests themselves are then driven programmatically from MATLAB

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago (1 children)

visually 🤭🤣

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Give 'em an occular pat down.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago

I was actually offered a Bachelor thesis topic by a company to write a test bench for a product in LabView.

From what they told me and my other engineering experience I'd suggest going with an approach similar to what's used with HDLs. For unit tests create test benches in the language itself which call the functions you want to test with a predefined input (e.g. from a file) and then analyse and save the output.

You can extend this to obtaining other information as well, but tbh I'll bet it's still gonna be a pain.

Hope that helps at least a little.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I tried MS Word a few times and decided that drag-and-drop UIs are not for me

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

Tell me about it... I don't even use visual editors for charts, I use Mermaid.js in https://mermaid.live/

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Visual... programming languages? Yikes.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

There are quite a few of them