[enhancement] There are a lot of tests written without the tools we should use

Bug Description

Over the course of the project we've gained better support of C++11 and written utilities for configuring the system. But we've not updated tests to reflect this.

This causes problems for people writing new tests or trying to the existing code as examples because there is a tendency to copy these legacy tests.

The test code is a deliverable folks and needs cleaning up so it looks the way we'd like to see our library used.