Expand the testing section of the hacking docs

- Make it clear what the different kind of tests are, where they live
  and how they can be ran
- Ask people to primarily write unit tests

1 files changed, 29 insertions, 12 deletions

diff --git a/doc/manual/src/contributing/hacking.md b/doc/manual/src/contributing/hacking.md
index 90a8f1f94..7ce8d8de6 100644
--- a/doc/manual/src/contributing/hacking.md
+++ b/doc/manual/src/contributing/hacking.md
@@ -71,18 +71,6 @@ To install it in `$(pwd)/outputs` and test it:
 nix (Nix) 3.0
 ```
 
-To run a functional test:
-
-```console
-make tests/test-name-should-auto-complete.sh.test
-```
-
-To run the unit-tests for C++ code:
-
-```
-make check
-```
-
 If you have a flakes-enabled Nix you can replace:
 
 ```console
@@ -94,3 +82,32 @@ by:
 ```console
 $ nix develop
 ```
+
+## Testing
+
+Nix comes with three different flavors of tests: unit, functional and integration.
+
+Most tests are currently written as functional tests.
+**However**, it is preferable (as much as it makes sense) to primarily test new code with unit tests.
+
+### Unit-tests
+
+The unit-tests for each Nix library (`libexpr`, `libstore`, etc..) are defined
+under `src/{library_name}/tests` using the
+[googletest](https://google.github.io/googletest/) framework.
+
+You can run the whole testsuite with `make check`, or the tests for a specific component with `make libfoo-tests_RUN`. Finer-grained filtering is also possible using the [--gtest_filter](https://google.github.io/googletest/advanced.html#running-a-subset-of-the-tests) command-line option.
+
+### Functional tests
+
+The functional tests reside under the `tests` directory and are listed in `tests/local.mk`.
+The whole testsuite can be run with `make install && make installcheck`.
+Individual tests can be run with `make tests/{testName}.sh.test`.
+
+### Integration tests
+
+The integration tests are defined in the Nix flake under the `hydraJobs.tests` attribute.
+These tests include everything that needs to interact with external services or run Nix in a non-trivial distributed setup.
+Because these tests are expensive and require more than what the standard github-actions setup provides, they only run on the master branch (on <https://hydra.nixos.org/jobset/nix/master>).
+
+You can run them manually with `nix build .#hydraJobs.tests.{testName}` or `nix-build -A hydraJobs.tests.{testName}`