If you are interested in understanding the internals of Google Test, building from source, or contributing ideas or modifications to the project, then this document is for you.
First, let's give you some background of the project.
All Google Test source and pre-built packages are provided under the New BSD License.
The Google Test community exists primarily through the discussion group and the GitHub repository. You are definitely encouraged to contribute to the discussion and you can also help us to keep the effectiveness of the group high by following and promoting the guidelines listed here.
Showing courtesy and respect to others is a vital part of the Google culture, and we strongly encourage everyone participating in Google Test development to join us in accepting nothing less. Of course, being courteous is not the same as failing to constructively disagree with each other, but it does mean that we should be respectful of each other when enumerating the 42 technical reasons that a particular proposal may not be the best choice. There's never a reason to be antagonistic or dismissive toward anyone who is sincerely trying to contribute to a discussion.
Sure, C++ testing is serious business and all that, but it's also a lot of fun. Let's keep it that way. Let's strive to be one of the friendliest communities in all of open source.
As always, discuss Google Test in the official GoogleTest discussion group. You don't have to actually submit code in order to sign up. Your participation itself is a valuable contribution.
If you want to get your hands dirty with the code inside Google Test, this is the section for you.
Once you check out the code, you can find instructions on how to compile it in the README file.
A testing framework is of no good if itself is not thoroughly tested. Tests should be written for any new code, and changes should be verified to not break existing tests before they are submitted for review. To perform the tests, follow the instructions in README and verify that there are no failures.
We are excited that Google Test is now open source, and hope to get great patches from the community. Before you fire up your favorite IDE and begin hammering away at that new feature, though, please take the time to read this section and understand the process. While it seems rigorous, we want to keep a high standard of quality in the code base.
You must sign a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) before we can accept any code. The CLA protects you and us.
Follow either of the two links above to access the appropriate CLA and instructions for how to sign and return it.
To keep the source consistent, readable, diffable and easy to merge, we use a fairly rigid coding style, as defined by the google-styleguide project. All patches will be expected to conform to the style outlined here.
Some of Google Test's source files are generated by the Pump tool (a
Python script). If you need to update such files, please modify the
source (foo.h.pump
) and re-generate the C++ file using Pump. You
can read the PumpManual for details.
Please do submit code. Here's what you need to do:
The current members of the Google Test engineering team are the only committers at present. In the great tradition of eating one's own dogfood, we will be requiring each new Google Test engineering team member to earn the right to become a committer by following the procedures in this document, writing consistently great code, and demonstrating repeatedly that he or she truly gets the zen of Google Test.
We follow a typical release process:
release-X.Y
is created.Z
in X.Y.Z
) is made by creating a tag from the branch.This page is based on the Making GWT Better guide from the Google Web Toolkit project. Except as otherwise noted, the content of this page is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.