Writing tests for your OCS Agents is important for the long term maintanence of your Agent. Tests allow other developers to contribute to your Agent and easily confirm that their changes did not break functionality within the Agent. With some setup, tests can also allow you to test your Agent without access to the hardware that it controls.
Testing within OCS comes in two forms, unit tests and integration tests. Unit tests test functionality of the Agent code directly, without running the Agent itself (or any supporting parts, such as the crossbar server, or a piece of hardware to connect to.)
Integration tests run a small OCS network, starting up the crossbar server, your Agent, and any supporting programs that your Agent might need (for instance, a program accepting serial connections for you Agent to connect to). As a result, integration tests are more involved than unit tests, requiring more setup and thus taking longer to execute.
Both types of testing can be important for fully testing the functionality of your Agent.
This section details the helper functions within OCS for assisting with testing your Agents.
ocs.testing