Without further ado, I'd like to start … but where? It's not obvious what is the best order to describe the framework. One can use bottom up approach, starting with with basics and going up to cover real interfaces based on them. The downside is that you'll have to dig through the multiple pages of information you may not never need in real life. One can follow the order of test program execution. From test initialization to test tree construction to the report and log generation. This also unfortunately may not be most clear way. The Boost.Test UTF is very flexible and a lot of details of various test initialization options may not necessarily important for average user, while understanding test output is.

Well … This is a User's Guide after all. Let's go by what you need to know to successfully use the UTF. Thus I follow the order of decisions you as a user have to make and order of complexity of the problems you have to solve. If you find yourself faces with some unclear term feel free to jump directly to the Glossary section, where I collection short definition for all used terms. And again if you want to jump right into coding the Tutorials section would be a better place to start.

The UTF has several usage variants. And the first decision you have to make is which one to use. These variants are covered in section dedicated to Usage variants. The next step, probably the most important for you, is to start writing test cases, bind them in test suites and implement your checks. First two topics are coverred in Test organization section, while Testing tools section arms you with rich set of tools enough to implement almost arbitrary check you need.

Next you'll learn how to understand and manipulate the UTF output in a Test output section. At that point you should be able to build and run most simple test modules and almost inevitable find a need to configure how the test module is executed. Whether you want to change output format, select which test case to run or run test cases in random order these and may other runtime configuration parameters are discribed in Runtime configuration section.

One of the first non trivial things you might want toadd to your test module is test fixture. Fixture support is coverred in Test fixture section. Usually th default test module initialization will work just fine, but if you want to implement some custom initialization or change how default initialization behaves you need to first look in Test module initialization section. Here you'll learn about various options the UTF provides for you to customize this behavior.

Finally you might want to learn about how the UTF implements entry points into the test modules. This is especially important if you intend to implement main function yourself (and not use the main function provided by the UTF). The Test runners section covers this subject. Different usage variants employ slightly different approached to implementing test module entry points and presents slightly different interfaces. This section intended for advanced user some of the details of the implementation are described there.