Integration of System Tests in the build process

I am continuing the development of a serialization layer generator. The user enters a description of types (currently in XSD or in WSDL), and the software produces code in a certain target language (currently, Java and ansi C89) which is able to represent the types described and which is also able to serialize (turn into a 开发者_如何学编程byte-sequence) and deserialize these values.

Since generating code is tricky (I mean, writing code is hard. Writing code that writes code is writing code to do a hard thing, which is a whole new land of hardness :) ). Thus, in the project which preceded my master thesis, we decided that we want some system tests in place.

These system tests know a type and a number of pairs of values and byte sequences. In order to execute a system test in a certain language, the type is run through the syste, resulting in code as described above. This code is then linked with some handwritten host-code, which is capable of reading these pairs of a byte sequence and a value and functions to read values of the given value from a string. The resulting executable is then run and the byte-value-pairs are fed into this executable and it is overall checked if all such bindings result in the output "Y". If this is the case, then these example values for the type serialize into the previously defined byte sequence and we can conclude that the generated code compiles and runs correctly, and thus, overall, that the part of the system handling this type is correct. This is a very good thing.

However, right now I am a bit unhappy with the current implementation. Currently, I have written a custom junit runner which uses quite a lot of reflection sorcery in order to read these byte-value-bindings from a classes attributes. Also, the overall stack to generate the code requires a lot of boilerplate code and boilerplate classes which do little more than to contain two or three strings. Even worse, it is quite hard to get a good integration with all tools which base on Junits descriptions and which generate test failure reports. It is quite hard to actually debug what is happening if the helpful maven Junit testrunner or the eclipse test runner gobble up whatever errors the compiler threw, just because the format of this error is different from junits own assertion errors.

Even worse, a single failed test in the generated code causes the maven build to fail. This is very annoying. I like it if the maven build fails if a certain test of a different unit fails, because (for example), if a certain depth first preorder calculation fails for some reason, everything will go haywire. However, if I just want to show someone some generated code for a type I know working, then it is very annoying if I cannot quickly build my application because the type I am working on right now is not finished.

So, given this background, how can I get a nice automated system which checks these generation specifications? Possibilities I have considererd:

• A Junit integrated solution appears to be less than ideal, unless I can improve the integration of maven and junit and junit with my runner and everything else.
• We used fitnesse earlier, but overall ditched it, because it caused more problems than it solved. The major issues we had were integration into maven and hudson.
• A solution using texttest. I am not entirely convinced, because this mostly wants an executable, strings to put on stdin and strings to expect on stdout. Adding the whole "run application, link with host code and THEN run the generated executable" seems kinda complicated.
• Writing my own solution. This will of course work and do what I want. However, this will be the most time consuming task, as usual.

So... do you see another possible way to do this while avoiding to write something own?

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You can run Maven with -Dmaven.test.skip=true. Netbeans has a way to set this automatically unless you explicitly hit one of the commands to test the project, I don't know about Eclipse.