The Death of NUnit Revisited: Will it be Fire?
In my earlier post, The Death Of NUnit - Will it be Ice?, I adopted the notion - promoted in some mailing list posts - that NUnit might be dead or dying. I identified two big worries: death by ice and death by fire. Ice stood for frozen inactivity on the part of the project itself - failure to move ahead. Fire symbolized competitive forces, which might make NUnit obsolete.
About NUnit 2.2.4... Whoops... Make that 2.2.5
I've been occupied with other things and not blogging lately. Meanwhile - in fact this is one of the things I've been occupied with - NUnit 2.2.4 was released. People tried it and found a few bugs - NUnit 2.2.5 corrects them.
NUnit for .Net 2.0 - Do We Really Need It?
The NUnit 2.2.3 release contains two versions of each download: one built with .Net 1.1, one with .Net 2.0. So, what's the deal? Do we need separate versions? And which version do you need? I'll try to explain...
NUnit 2.2.3 Released
NUnit 2.2.3 is now out. You can get it at our SourceForge site. The release notes are available here.
When You Don't Have a Framework
We forget sometimes how easy it is to write tests - even without a framework. I was sitting in a cafe, working on my new laptop. It's an Acer Ferrari 4000 that I'm very happy with, but I haven't completely set it up yet.
The Death of NUnit - Will it be Ice?
A recent post on the NUnit Open Discussion Forum on Sourceforge asked “Is NUnit Dead?” I have to admit: the question irked me a bit. But reflecting on it has led me to a few conclusions that I’ll share here.
What's with OpenDomain.org?
The opendomain.org site seems to have acquired nunit.net, a domain we thought about using but didn't. Now I'm sorry, since they could use it for pretty much any purpose.
User Test Fixtures: How Many? How Long?
There's a discussion going on right now on the Yahoo Test-Driven Development list regarding the use of a single instance of the user TestFixture class in NUnit 2.x, as compared to multiple instances in NUnit 1.x and in JUnit before it. A related issue, discussed on the same list a while back, is the question of the lifetime of that single instance. Here's my take on how the issues relate and how NUnit deals with them.
How NUnit Finds Config Files
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...
What's a Test Worth?
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.