CppCon 2020

You've inherited some Qt GUI code: it's valuable, but it doesn't have tests, and it wasn't designed to be testable, so you need to start refactoring. But you can't refactor safely until the code has tests, and you can't add tests without refactoring! How can you ever break out of this loop?

The talk will review the challenges and potential sources of error that are specific to code that uses the Qt cross-platform graphical user interface library, and then describe how to guard against them.

There are many options for unit-testing Qt code, including Qt Test, Google Test and Catch. As well as covering those, and general principles for applying them, I will present a small but surprisingly effective C++11 library for applying "Approval Tests" to cross-platform Qt code.

Finally, the talk will briefly cover some other tools that can aid with inspecting and maintaining Qt code, which can in turn improve testability.

Attendees will discover some quick, practical techniques to help write unit tests and integration tests for Qt code.