Lessons Learned in Programmer Testing

It has been more than six years since the first release of NUnit 2.0, an open source unit testing tool. In that time, literally millions of tests have been written using the tool. Many of these tests have become and continue to be invaluable resources for their teams. Unfortunately, many other NUnit-based tests have not been maintained and are now viewed as having been a waste of effort from the beginning. What separates tests that are used, maintained, and highly valued from tests that are quickly discarded? James Newkirk describes seven key ideas that are proven to increase the readability of NUnit tests and make them much easier to maintain. Learn about the impact of test fixture size and dependency injection on unit testing. James demonstrates how to use the attributes [ExpectedException], [Setup], and [TearDown] to make tests more readable. Incorporating these and the other lessons can make the difference between tests that become a burden to the team and tests that become practical, growing resources.