What did you learn today? - Generating Test Skeletons

Monday, October 17, 2005

Generating Test Skeletons by phildenoncourt

Nowadays there is a lot of discussion about TDD (Test Driven Development). While I think that anything that forces developers to pay more attention to testing their code is a good thing, I am not convinced that TDD is going to reduce my defect rate. My methodology is to write the code for a problem, document it, ruggedize (add range checks, errorhandling, and verify that resources will always be released), and then write unit tests.

When I talk about unit tests to developers, with the goal of trying to get them to place their unit tests in a unit testing framework like nUnit, there is a tendency for them to balk. "You want me to spend time writing code that an end user will never run" (read - Can I bill for that?), or "That would mean we'd have to start managing our previously disposable test harness code" (read - That means if I change my interface, the test code won't compile), or "Who is going to test the test code?" (read - I'm skeptical this will work and I'm trying to get out of doing this)

My experience with the three projects I've implemented full unit testing is that it is well worth the effort. Obviously, there is going to be more overhead when building the first version. However, it has saved me tremendous time when deploying the 2nd, 3rd, 4th.... time. Not only am I able to test the new features quickly, I can run the entire battery to make sure that I didn't break something when adding a new feature.

There is a utility called "Reflector Graph" that writes test skeletons for you. It is an addin to reflector. To generate a test skeleton, make sure you add the addin to reflector. Find the class you want to create a test for; right click and select Code Generation. On the drop down, select which type of object you are interested in.

Monday, October 17, 2005 5:23:57 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

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