ISerializable - Roy Osherove's Blog

Alternative NUnit GUI

I figured this was some spam... I've never heard of AdapDev and they bcc'd my email address. Further, I got two emails from the same "Sean McCormack" with different info in each.

These got zapped from my email... interested to hear what you find out.

Ouch. Don't like hearing my name and spam in the same paragraph. To clarify, the only people that would have received an email from me are those that downloaded a beta version of Codus (an ORM tool) from my site (they had to provide their email), or registered for my announcements newsletter (also had to provide their email). That's it. Rich, is it possible that you downloaded a beta version of Codus from my website?

Duly noted, Sean, and I'm sure that's how I got on the list. Generally, when I get emails without a valid 'to' address, I will find them suspect if I don't know the sender.

I really appreciate your attentiveness to this, Sean. I apologize for disparaging your name :-). I'll be much more likely to look at the tools now!

Well, more power to these guys, although we would have loved to have them help with some of the same features on NUnit. There roadmap and wish list looks a lot like ours.
One comment on their rationale for not doing so:

"Initially, this was the goal. However, several of the key features in Zanebug - such as test iterations - would have required a complete rewrite of the underlying NUnit engine."

That's not really so, but I'd guess an honest mistake. Lot's of people assume there's an "engine" that runs the tests. Of course there is a test runner, but actuallye of each different type of test runs itself. That's how we support plugin attributes for test extensions, running csunit tests, etc.

A lot of what is being done in reporting is also available for NUnit but it's not bundled and not advertised very strongly - or at all - I tell people about it when they have a problem.
Maybe we should put them all someplace.

I do think these folks could have found some better way to describe their system than calling it "professional" as compared to NUnit. There's a lot of professional experience in the NUnit team - that's what led me to choose it in the first place. Maybe it's just market-speak.

I'd also like to know what the licensing means about non-commercial versus commercial use. It could be a pretty serious limitation. Until it's clearer, I dont' feel I can look at the source, so long as I'm working on NUnit.

Charlie

Charlie,

Thanks for the comments. You covered a lot of ground, but I'll try to keep up. :)

First and foremost, I think NUnit is an excellent tool, and the use of "professional" shouldn't be interpreted in any way as a strike against NUnit or the people in the project. The term "professional" was in reference to the Zanebug UI, which in our opinion provides more information and options than the current NUnit GUI. Perhaps "enhanced" would have been a better term. NUnit remains the leading test unit, and the strides we made with Zanebug wouldn't have been possible without modelling from NUnit. I think there's recognition throughout the development community of NUnit's place in TDD, and the achievements of its authors (and professionalism ;). Likewise, we realized Zanebug wouldn't provide much value w/o support for NUnit, which is further testament to the success of your project. So, please don't misinterpret it.

We actually attempted to start with NUnit and enhance it. Likewise, we looked at MbUnit and Marc Clifton's AUT - all good frameworks. However, in each case, the changes that would have been required for our purposes would have been significant from our perspective. We deemed it easier (right or wrong) to just start writing our own. This was also invaluable for us just because of the experience it provided with multiple aspects of the framework (remoting, reflection, attributes, threading, forms, etc.). I don't discount that NUnit could or does provide the same features - especially given the more recent releases...but at the time it either wasn't apparent, appeared to require too much work w/o guarante off our changes being included, or our personal goals and aspirations outweighed it. At it's core, I really consider Zanebug just to be an extension to NUnit, with an enhanced GUI. The result is a project that builds on your work - and doesn't discourage its usage - but at the same time allows us to enhance and extend according to our own goals and timeline.

Lastly, I apologize for the confusion - there is no dual licensing model (non-commercial vs commercial). The entire tool, and code, is licensed freely under the Apache License 2.0, which states you can use it for any purpose. The only underlying requirement is that the copyright info and any changes be kept in all original code - same as the NUnit requirements. I'll make sure that the FAQ is updated to clarify this issue. Please feel free to look at the code - it's provided free and open-source, in the same spirit as NUnit.

Sean