Implement testing

[caloisio]

Testing is an essential aspect of good Engineering/Development practice. The robustness, performance, and overall quality of our code will improve if we include regular testing as a part of our process.

Proposed Definitions

testing: verifying that the implementation of a component performs as-designed unit testing: testing the component in isolation integration testing: testing the component in conjunction with the overall system performance testing (benchmarking): measuring a metric of a component or system

Tasks

• [ ] Investigate how to implement unit, integration, and performance tests in a robotpy-based project
• [ ] Implement a testing framework
• [ ] Configure the github project to run and validate tests on code-change
• [ ] Optional: Configure the github project to track the result of performance tests over time

[caloisio]

My experience after some quick noodling around with pytest https://github.com/1757WestwoodRobotics/2022-RapidReact/compare/pytest-investigations:

• It is possible to include wpilib components in a non-robot-or-simulator environment (pytest)
• It is not clear how to test components with respect to execution state
  • unknown how to configure/trigger the HAL that many wpilib components hook into to increment a timestep and see the result (e.g. set a motor voltage for a set time, see an associated encoder record an expected distance change)
• pytest may be a viable framework for unit-testing the correctness of our algorithms, provided they are architectured so that they are either stateless or capable of consuming injected state

[agelsomini]

This should be considered a relatively high priority item for the off season. With Dustin's changes this year the robotpy test frameworks are at least partially running. We should be able to write tests for both modules in isolation and things that interact with the HAL.

One area that we should definitely focus on is providing example tests that test the state transitions as that seems to be a place where we have had issues.