Daily Archives: June 4, 2008

Review: Pragmatic Unit Testing in C# with NUnit, 2nd Ed.

I saw this book when I bought Programming WPF a few weeks ago and it looked promising enough to buy. I’ve been doing unit testing in C# for a few years now, but I thought there were always things to learn and maybe I’d pick up a few new ideas.

It is easy to contrast this book with Beck’s Test Driven Development: By Example, and the two books definitely have a very different feel.

Beck’s book has a very evangelical feel to it, and it’s main purpose is to teach a mind set more than technical details. I believe this is important–maybe of first importance–but once you understand that, the rest of the book is a little simplistic for more experienced developers.

Pragmatic Unit Testing, on the other hand, focuses much more on the practical aspects (hmmm….I highly suspect that’s where the title comes from….) of unit testing. I liked the ideas on how to use categories and attributes to segregate tests that take too long to run on a regular basis. I also liked the section on singletons and getting around time-dependencies. The DateTime.Now problem is something I’ve had to deal with quite a bit in our server-side software that has a lot of time-dependant behavior. (In most cases, the problems were solved with refactoring the time into a function parameter.)

There are also good discussions of more mundane issues like how to deploy NUnit, where to put tests in a project, team practices, GUIs, threading, and C#-specific issues.

The discussion about mock objects (a very basic introduction) is also quite clear and understandable–more so than many resources I’ve seen on the web, which often assume you already know all about them.

Something I don’t like: the acronyms (BICEP, CORRECT, A TRIP). They kind of bug me. I like the ideas behind the acronyms and I think it’s more important and effective (for me, anyway) to internalize the principles of testing rather than remembering specific acronyms and the words they go with. YMMV.

Last Word…

I will probably only read Test Drive Development: By Example once,  but I will definitely come back to Pragmatic Unit Testing occasionally to refresh my ideas.