Tuesday, August 31, 2010

Reworking FAST

The role of the FAST software repository has evolved over the past few years, and it is time to rethink what the goal of FAST is. See Rethinking the goal of FAST for some perspective about FAST. The upshot is that FAST has been reorganized to support an ensemble of independent software packages related to agile software development.

One important change in this reorganization has been the decomposition of the FAST Python software into independent components. Some elements of FAST are deprecated, and the rest have been spread out into various packages. See the FAST Blog for further details.

Sunday, August 29, 2010

Update for gcovr

The gcovr command provides a utility for running the gcov command and summarizing code coverage results. This command is inspired by the Python coverage.py package, which provides a similar utility in Python. Further, gcovr can be viewed as a command-line alternative of the lcov utility, which runs gcov and generates an HTML output.

Recently, the gcovr script has been broken out into a separate software package, which is managed at

https://software.sandia.gov/svn/public/fast/gcovr

This package has been uploaded to the Python PyPI repository to facilitate it installation with easy_install:

easy_install gcovr

Alternatively, the gcovr script can be downloaded directly:


See the gcovr Trac page for further details about this tool. Although gcovr is increasingly used to generate coverage statistics within Hudson, the gcovr wiki documents a command-line text summary that I personally find very useful when developing tests to improve code coverage.