Comments on: NUnit and TDD - Fail First

By: Michael

Michael — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 17:12:45 +0000

If you have NUnit then that should be fine. The built-in testing in Visual Studio is good for developers new to Unit testing and they may find it easier to learn and do testing if it is already part of Visual Studio. Also, it may be an easier sell if you tell developers that it is from Microsoft and built into to Visual Studio. I have never used TypeMock but have heard that it can be very powerful and possibly too powerful if not used properly. What I mean is that a developer can get away with writing lousy code that can still be tested by Typemock. I prefer Rhino Mocks because it is free and it allows you to do state based testing and behavior based testing. State based testing is simply using assert statements on variables and function return results whereas behavior state testing allows you to test that certain objects/methods are called in the correct sequence based on a set of preconditions. And don’t forget NMock is out there and is free too. NMock has a shorter learning curve than Rhino Mocks and the documentation and tutorials for NMock are easier to understand than Rhino Mocks.

By: Mark Freedman

Mark Freedman — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 15:02:55 +0000

Michael, Typemock looks affordable, so I’m going to look into it. But would you recommend this over something like RhinoMock, which I’ve heard mentioned more? I’ll do some digging myself.

We decided to skip the built-in unit testing for a few reasons. One was the fact that NUnit is free anyway, and extremely popular, another was because a few people in our department are already experienced with NUnit, and we could pick their brains, and finally, we use ReSharper, which we just realized has great VS integration for NUnit. Also, I’ve read about some serious frustrations people have had with the built-in version. There does seem to be some cool features for the built-in tool, though, and I will experiment with it more.

Thanks.

By: Mark Freedman

Mark Freedman — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 14:51:04 +0000

Thanks, Menahem. I started reading your articles. By the way, your blog home page is impossible to read. For some reason, the font is dark blue on brown, and unreadable without selecting the text. But the individual articles are perfectly readable. I think it’s just a home page issue.

By: Michael

Michael — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 15:51:35 +0000

Mark,

Typemock is a good tool for generating tests for existing code. You do not need to refactor existing code to use Typemock. The drawback is that Typemock costs money to buy. The Visual Studio 2008 IDE has unit testing and code coverage built into the product. It makes it easier for a development team to implement testing. You can write a test first but you can also use Visual studio to generate a test method by right-clicking on a method you just wrote and then select generate unit test. As far as knowing which tests to write first, you can determine these tests from your use cases on a new project or for a new enhancement.

By: Menahem Cohen

Menahem Cohen — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 06:36:29 +0000

Hi Mark…
I have read your post and it is familiar to me.
I began using automated tests and TDD few years ago.
Actually I was first in the team that began using automated tests.
I wrote in my blog about how did it work.
I think it will be interesting to you to read
http://experienceuser.blogspot.com/
There is more in
http://blog.typemock.com/search/label/beginners

Waiting for comments (if you wish)
Menahem Cohen