What The ....!! : VSTS Unit Testing

One of the awesome features of VSTS (although most are still prefer the NUnit / MbUnit). It's ok guys.. Since I'm gonna play with the VSTS, i'll go for its unit testing capabilities first. Appreciate any input. (For my quick reff)

Unit testing—the process of testing the smallest possible piece of code that can run

Cool stumbled:
Walkthru, Jason's Q&A on Unit Testing in VSTS, Brian's findings , Jeff Levinson's How-To

Remember...

Taking advantage of this functionality isn't difficult, but it does require that you think through the process carefully; otherwise, you'll create holes in the tests you conduct. I'll show you how to implement unit tests with VSTS, first by creating a small sample app to test with, then walking you through the assorted steps.

"Aaaaahhh.... awesome result"

The truth?

Tracking Bugs is Easier Well, not necessarily. How do you know that your tests are correct? That they fail when something actually breaks down? How do you know that you're covering enough code in your tests to ensure that if anything is wrong in your production code, that some test, somewhere, will break?

What happens if you have bugs in your unit tests? You'll suddenly start getting a lot of false positives—essentially, a bug will be found, but the problem won't be in your code under test. Your test's logic has a bug and therefore the test fails. These bugs are the most annoying and hardest to find because you're usually looking in the wrong place, checking your application instead of checking your tests. In Section I, I'll show you how to ensure that having a lot of unit tests does in fact make tracking bugs easier.

Code is Easier to Maintain Considering the last point, you're probably inclined to think this belief isn't necessarily true either. And you're right. Let's say that for each logical method in your code you have at least one test method. (Realistically, you'll probably have even more.) In projects with good test coverage, as much as 60 percent of the code can be unit tests. Now consider that the tests have to be maintained as well. What happens if you have 20 tests against a complex logical method and you add a parameter to the method? The tests won't compile. The same thing happens when you change constructors of classes. Suddenly you find yourself needing to change a lot of tests just to make sure your application still works. And that takes lots of time.

For this belief to be true, you need to make sure your tests are easy to maintain. Write them while keeping the DRY rule in mind: Don't Repeat Yourself. I'll look at this issue more closely later.

Code is More Understandable This is a benefit of unit tests that people don't usually expect at first. Think about changing code (say, a specific class or a method) in a project you've never seen before. How do you approach the code? You probably go around all the project code looking for places where this specific class or method is being used. Not surprisingly, unit tests are a great place to find such examples. And, when written correctly, unit tests can provide a handy set of API documentation for the project, easing the process of documenting and understanding code behavior written by old and new developers on the team.

However, this is only true if the tests are readable and understandable, a rule that many unit test developers don't follow. I'll expand on this belief, and show you how to write readable unit tests in the Readable Tests section of this article. -via

Tags: Visual Studio Team System Unit Testing, VSTS, Visual Studio, Unit Testing, MbUnit vs. NUnit Vs. Team System Unit Testing, dudesdoingdotnet