A project intending to extend and advance unit testing methodologies with the
intention of moving unit testing into a more widely accepted discipline,
possibly integrated with future development platforms.
Visit our sister project MbUnit, run by
Jonathan de Halleux. MbUnit allows
the construction of complex fixtures at runtime and facilitates designing
fixtures based on well known
unit test patterns
and Model Based Testing.
Roadmap
Project Overview
Development Tracks
Status
Tools & Technologies
Latest Releases
Coding Style Guidelines
Screenshots
The Application
Xml Output
Goals
Unit testing is an undeveloped, immature methodology. The goal of this
project is to move this methodology into a more stable and mature engineering
discipline. This means:
- providing useful tools to the developer for creating, managing,
maintaining, and tracking tests and test results
- identifying specific unit test patterns that can be as a foundation
stone for inexperienced test writers
- providing reverse and forward engineering tools to automate unit test
generation for existing and new development efforts
The impetus for this project is the general lack of understanding of "how to
write a good unit test" and the observation that the concept of unit testing is
under-developed. The final goal of the project is to explore avenues in
which unit tests can be automatically generated through C#'s reflection
mechanism and interactive wizards. This includes reverse engineering
(defining unit tests for existing code), and forward engineering (generating
unit tests and stub application code). The final application should also
provide some automation regarding the generation of mock objects to facilitate
simulating complex and/or undeveloped aspects of the application. Unit
testing is also more than just writing a unit test. It is also a
documentation tool. Ancillary functionality of the application is to
extract meaningful documentation that the programmer can use during application
implementation.
Scope
Unit test applications already exist. This project consists of several
development efforts with the intention of attaining its goals. These
aspects are:
- enrich the test suite available to the programmer
- develop automation functions to assist in
- reverse engineering
- forward engineering
- implement front-end wizards to guide the developer through unit test
development
- provide documentation identifying unit test patterns
- interface with one or more defect tracking systems to automatically
register defects detected by failed unit tests
- interface with a web service to publish test runs, the goal being to
provide a generic gateway which can be used to automate the injection of
defects into existing defect tracking systems
- auto-document unit test requirements, as much as is feasible, as a guide
for the application developer
- generate mock object stubs where designated by the unit test developer
- extract mock object stubs from production code for the purposes of
simplifying complex interfaces and test fixture setups
- integration with Microsoft's VisualStudio (MSVS)
- integrate with existing quality assurance processes
Development Environment
The initial development environment and platform will be C# and .NET.
Microsoft Visual Studio (MSVS) will be the primary development platform with the intent
of supporting the development under Mono as well. C# and .NET have been
chosen for the following features:
- reflection
- modular assembly capability
- XML services
- web services
The VisualStudio platform is the primary development platform
mainly because of its maturity and completeness.
Further Reading
The following articles have been written by Marc Clifton and discuss the
fundamentals of unit testing, explore a case study, and develop an extended unit
testing platform which is intended to be a vehicle for developing the goals
discussed in this project.
Advanced Unit Testing, Part I - Overview
Advanced Unit Testing, Part II - Core Implementation
Advanced Unit Testing, Part III - Testing Processes
Advanced Unit Testing, Part IV - Fixture Setup/Teardown, Test Repetition, And Performance Tests
Advanced Unit Testing, Part V - Unit Test Patterns
Related resources
MbUnit
MbUnit is a
Test Framework for the .Net platform that feels like other "Custom
Attribute" based tools. It is an evolutionary and highly customizable test
framework: fixtures are defined by connecting elementary pieces at runtime.
For example, by chaining the SetUp, Test and TearDown handlers, you generate
the SimpleTest fixture pattern. In fact, MbUnit is not limited to Unit
Testing, it also supports Model Based Testing, another deadly bug hunter.
Like all projects, MbUnit has a lot of item on the to-do list and needs
people contribution to evolve: testers, developers, documentation writers,
etc...If you care to have a look, take a peak at
http://mbunit.tigris.org
Unit Test Automation Applications:
CSUnit
NUnit
JUnit
Methodologies
Extreme Programming - one of
the key aspects of XP is unit testing and is one of the Agile Methods
Agile Software Community
General Articles
The Benefits
Of Automated Unit Testing, by Sami Vaaraniemi
