Learner Profiles

## Experienced Fortran Developer who is new to unit testing

  • Has lots of experience writing Fortran (possibly new to Fortran types).
  • Does not currently write unit tests in Fortran (might be experienced with writing tests in other languages).
  • What they don’t know
    • How to write tests in Fortran.
    • How to use Fortran types.
    • How to integrate tests into build system.
    • Good practice for writing unit tests.
    • How to write testable code.
  • Mental models
    • Procedures are not always separate neat units. They are often full features which would be very difficult to unit test.
    • Fortran in a very functional language without the use of types.
    • Global state is necessary for Fortran code.
  • Motivation
    • They wish to add unit testing into their own code bases but don’t know how to.
    • They have heard of unit testing but don’t know what it is or how it applies to their Fortran code

Experienced Developer who is new to Fortran


  • New to Fortran but can understand the syntax.
  • Regularly writes unit tests in other languages such as python.
  • Expects to work on Fortran in the Future and wants to know how to test their code.
  • What they don’t know
    • How to write tests in Fortran.
    • How to use Fortran types.
    • How to integrate tests into build system.
    • How to build Fortran code.
    • How to manage packages, compilers, etc for compiled code such as Fortran.
  • Mental models
    • Pytest style unit tests.
      • Draw on parallels of Fortran test tools and pytest.
  • Motivation
    • They wish to add unit testing into Fortran code bases they are starting to collaborate on.
    • They want to understand how unit testing in Fortran is done, compared to languages such as python.