Lessons Learned in Programmer Testing

I have just finished the early summer conference circuit. I  spoke at the p&p Summit in Quebec City in early May, TechEd Developer in Orlando, and the Better Software Development Conference in Las Vegas.

The session that I gave at all of the conferences was about lessons that I have learned writing programmer tests over the years. Some of these lessons are now embodied in xUnit.net. I have attached the presentation (2135.7K) to this blog post. You can also download all of the sample code  (214.0K) from the sessions as well. The code is licensed under the Microsoft Public License.

Joe White has a detailed write-up on his blog outlining the TechEd session. He takes me to task about being dogmatic in a couple of places. I will admit to being dogmatic when it comes to test readability and maintenance. The specific lessons “Don’t use Setup and Teardown” and “Don’t use abstract base test classes” are discussed with readability and maintainability as the primary goals. This does potentially increase code duplication but I am willing to do that to improve the communication of the code.