NASA Logo

NTRS

NTRS - NASA Technical Reports Server

Collections About News Help Login
Back to Results
Adoption of Test Driven Development and Continuous Integration for the Development of the Trick Simulation ToolkitThis paper describes the adoption of a Test Driven Development approach and a Continuous Integration System in the development of the Trick Simulation Toolkit, a generic simulation development environment for creating high fidelity training and engineering simulations at the NASA/Johnson Space Center and many other NASA facilities. It describes what was learned and the significant benefits seen, such as fast, thorough, and clear test feedback every time code is checked-in to the code repository. It also describes a system that encourages development of code that is much more flexible, maintainable, and reliable. The Trick Simulation Toolkit development environment provides a common architecture for user-defined simulations. Trick builds executable simulations using user-supplied simulation-definition files (S_define) and user supplied "model code". For each Trick-based simulation, Trick automatically provides job scheduling, checkpoint / restore, data-recording, interactive variable manipulation (variable server), and an input-processor. Also included are tools for plotting recorded data and various other supporting tools and libraries. Trick is written in C/C++ and Java and supports both Linux and MacOSX. Prior to adopting this new development approach, Trick testing consisted primarily of running a few large simulations, with the hope that their complexity and scale would exercise most of Trick's code and expose any recently introduced bugs. Unsurprising, this approach yielded inconsistent results. It was obvious that a more systematic, thorough approach was required. After seeing examples of some Java-based projects that used the JUnit test framework, similar test frameworks for C and C++ were sought. Several were found, all clearly inspired by JUnit. Googletest, a freely available Open source testing framework, was selected as the most appropriate and capable. The new approach was implemented while rewriting the Trick memory management component, to eliminate a fundamental design flaw. The benefits became obvious almost immediately, not just in the correctness of the individual functions and classes but also in the correctness and flexibility being added to the overall design. Creating code to be testable, and testing as it was created resulted not only in better working code, but also in better-organized, flexible, and readable (i.e., articulate) code. This was, in essence the Test-driven development (TDD) methodology created by Kent Beck. Seeing the benefits of Test Driven Development, other Trick components were refactored to make them more testable and tests were designed and implemented for them.
Document ID
20130003349
Acquisition Source
Johnson Space Center
Document Type
Conference Paper
Authors
Penn, John M. (NASA Johnson Space Center Houston, TX, United States)
Date Acquired
August 27, 2013
Publication Date
January 1, 2013
Subject Category
Computer Programming And Software
Report/Patent Number
JSC-CN-27958
Meeting Information
Meeting: AIAA Modeling and Simulation Technologies
Location: Boston, MA
Country: United States
Start Date: August 19, 2013
End Date: August 22, 2013
Sponsors: American Inst. of Aeronautics and Astronautics
Funding Number(s)
CONTRACT_GRANT: NNJ08HA01C
Distribution Limits
Public
Copyright
Work of the US Gov. Public Use Permitted.

Related Records

There are no records associated with this record.
No Preview Available