Introduction

The ELT development environment natively supports writing integration tests using Robot Framework, pytest or Nose.

The test tool etr was created to act as a unified interface for executing integration or system tests implemented using different test frameworks/runners, and to provide a mechanism for introducing ELT specific behaviour if necessary, such as setting up the test environment.

Scope

This document is the user manual for the ELT ICS Framework - Test Framework tool etr. The intended audience are users of etr e.g. ELT ICS Framework users, developers or software quality assurance engineers.

Although etr is a product of the ELT ICS Framework it does not depend on any other ICS Framework products and can be installed and used standalone.

Acronyms

ELT: Extremely Large Telescope
etr: Extensible Test Runner
ICS: Instrument Control System

Style Conventions

YAML Data Structures

This manual documents a number of YAML data structures, their “schema”, using these common conventions.

Typically a concrete example is first provided:

Example YAML data structure with sum-type list

 name: example
 optional: 3.0
 nestedAnonymous:
     nestedProperty: value

This top level structure is then documented, sometimes with named sub-objects. The types of each property use Python Variable Annotation syntax. For example a string would be str, a YAML object would be object, a list of strings would be List[str], a union of two alternative named objects like above would use Union[type1, type2], a list of union of named types would be List[Union[type1, type2]].

Unions are used when multiple type alternatives are allowed.

Each property of an object, consisting of a <name>, <type> and <default> is then documented as follows:

<name> (<type>) <default>

Documentation for property with name “<name>” type “<type>” and optionally a default value <default>.

If <type> must have a specific value, the literal value may be indicated instead.

If property is optional, the <type> can specify this using Python annotation syntax: Optional[<type>]. If there is a default value, <default> specifies it as [default DEFAULTVALUE]. Lists are often optional and in this case it is simply indicated by a default empty list value: [default: []]. When a property is optional and no value should be provided, the property should simply be omitted from the object rather than specify a null value.

If a property is an anonymous object with nested properties, it will be documented inline with nested indentation (see example below).

Documenting the named example structure above would look like:

Example ^{YAML}

(object)

name (str)

Name property.

optional (Optional[float]) [default: 1.0]

Optional property of float type with a default value of 1.0.

nestedAnonymous (object)

Example of how nested anonymous objects are documented.

nestedProperty (str): A nested property of this anonymous object.