My question is quite relevant to something asked before but I need some practical advice.
I have ‘Working effectively with legacy code’ in my hands and I ‘m using advice from the book as I read it in the project I ‘m working on. The project is a C++ application that consists of a few libraries but the major portion of the code is compiled to a single executable. I ‘m using googletest for adding unit tests to existing code when I have to touch something.
My problem is how can I setup my build process so I can build my unit tests since there are two different executables that need to share code while I am not able to extract the code from my ‘under test’ application to a library. Right now I have made my build process for the application that holds the unit tests link against the object files generated from the build process of the main application but I really dislike it. Are there any suggestions?
If your test app is only linking the object files it needs to test then you are effectively already treating them as a library, it should be possible to group those object files into a separate library for the main and the test app. If you can’t then I don’t see that what you are doing is too bad an alternative.
If you are having to link other object files not under test then that is a sign of dependencies that need to be broken, for which you have the perfect book. We have similar problems and use a system like the one suggested by Vlion