One of the toughest questions in projects that contain legacy code that would like to write unit tests from part of that code (it may need to change) are: "Where should I start?" When one of my clients faced this question a while ago I came up with a small formula to help understand where we should focus...

James Avery argues that what he'd really like to see in a unit test framework is the ability to run (and fail) multiple asserts within the same test. As some background, I personally am in favor of the " single assert per unit test " idea for several reasons, the most prominent of them is that currently...

I'm happy to announce that draft of chapter 1 from my upcoming book " The Art of Unit Testing " is available for download immediately - click here for the PDF . the book will also be available to download from Manning's home page . Chapter summary: Chapter 1 tries to give a better definition of what...

A while ago I wrote an article about database unit testing , and the various ways you could "rollback" the database state to the way it was before the test ran. Today I got an interesting comment from Mike Brockey : "I have yet another solution to this very common problem. We have been able to isolate...

Yet another tool to help with integration tests against the database layer(got this by email: "I wanted to let you know about an open source tool I created to help unit test the data access layer. http://www.codeplex.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ProjectName=MassDataHandler This tool uses knowledge...

It’s possible to create elegant small tests which require little to no configuration whatsoever that test out your custom rule’s ability to verify problems. (I'll be discussing a framework for FxCop integration testing in a later post) Here’s a sample unit test: You'll need to add a reference to three...

This post is a continuation of my Quest to test FxCop rules. The previous one was about writing pure unit tests for FxCop rules . This one is about writing Integration tests with a new framework I’ve developed called FxCopUnit. For the past few days I’ve been struggling with FxCop – I’ve been Reflectoring...

If you don't know what FxCop is, go look . You'll like it. In response to my release of FxCopUnit which allows an easier experience testing out FxCop custom rules, David Kean of the FxCop blog posted his thoughts on the matter . I highly respect the folks doing this work, this is a very powerful tool...

One of the things that I like to show people during my TDD courses, is how much easier it is to do a test review rather than a simple code review. A code review is like literally debugging the code with your eyes, trying to understand not only how it works, but what it's trying to do. The latter is much...

One of the things that I like to show people during my TDD courses, is how much easier it is to do a test review rather than a simple code review. A code review is like literally debugging the code with your eyes, trying to understand not only how it works, but what it's trying to do. The latter is much...