ARTE or the Automatic Regression Test Environment was originally developed by Panda Security which is now an open source project.
ARTE is a unit testing framework designed to test software modules on Linux systems. It is designed to work with black-box software modules, and becomes fully powerful when testing client/server architectures. Infact you can have it test anything! Right from a SIP server to a Web server or you can even have it test your antivirus checking for its detection rate. In other words, ARTE is not a usual unit testing framework, but something in between unit tests and system tests.
Features of ARTE:
Open source: ARTE is free software, and can be extended by anyone as long as the rules of the GPLv3+ license are satisfied.
Automatic execution: ARTE can be configured to run whenever you want!
RTA: RTAs or Regression Test Archives are the single tests run by the ARTE framework. These are password-zipped files which contain the TCL script to run, test description XML file, test configuration and additional needed files for the tests. The password protects the contents of the file, so that any kind of content can be stored inside (even virus-infected files).
New tests: Adding new tests in the ARTE framework is as easy as generating a correct RTA file, and placing it in the configured test archive folder. When ARTE runs, it will look for all the RTA files and execute them.
Test scripts: Tests are just TCL scripts where specific commands are available.
Extending the scripting language: If the built-in TCL commands are not enough, you can extend the scripting language with your own commands, by developing C-language plugins for ARTE. This built-in plugin infrastructure is really easy to use with a well defined plugin API.
Execution modes: You can configure ARTE to automatically start the module to analyze before any test, or to start/stop it for each one of the tests. This two main execution modes allow You to avoid inter-test dependencies.
There is not much to be written about ARTE, but much has to be done after having it installed on your operating system.
ARTE uses the Check unit-testing framework as the core test executer, and TCL (Tool Command Language) as the test interpreter.
ARTE is at a stable release version 0.2.0, that can be downloaded here.
