Slim XCTest Targets

XCTest has made testing on iOS dead simple easy; click a few buttons and a shiny new XCTest target is added to the project. There are still developers out there who don’t test, and the difficultly of adding test machinary to a project is no longer an excuse.

If you’re new to XCTest and want to give it a try, I recommend the 2013 WWDC video “Testing in Xcode 5.” Thirty minutes and you’ll be up to speed.

Adding XCTest to an existing project

The procedure to add XCTest to a new project is exactly the same as adding to an existing except for one important detail. To keep the XCTest target slim, the setting Symbols hidden by default must be switched to NO

Don’t add app sources to the test target!

The XCTest framework is injected into the app target at runtime and now has access to the symbols contained within. It’s not necessary to re-add these source files to the XCTest Target.

Remember, the XCTest target compile sources only requires test files. That’s it!

Originally published at zmcartor.github.io on February 24, 2014.