Lots of people write to ask about the use of configuration files with NUnit. Usually, they have put some setting in a config file - somewhere - and are wondering why NUnit doesn’t seem able to find it. In this post, I’ll try to summarize the main issues around NUnit’s use of configuration files. It really isn’t all that complicated, once you understand a few things…
In a discussion about unit-test suites that take too long to run, Ron Jeffries writes
Splitting the tests into slow and fast is a tradeoff, and it’s an easy one. But is it ideal? I think not. I think a better approach might be to split the tests into “likely to provide interesting information” and “unlikely to do so”. Then make the ones that are likely, also fast.
This struck me as an interesting point. If the value of a test is seen as the amount of information it is likely to provide and the cost is - at least in part - the time to run it, then the problem of which tests to keep in that “too slow” test run is quite similar to the value versus cost balancing problem we face in XP when we schedule stories into an iteration.
I’ve been wanting to get into blogging for a while and this is my first attempt. As the subtitle indicates, I expect to be posting a lot about testing - TDD in particular - but I won’t promise to limit myself to testing topics alone.
After investigating a number of alternatives, I decided to go with WordPress as the engine for this blog. The current format is a modified version of the default WordPress 1.5 theme.