NUnit vs. Your Own Unit Tests

larsun — Fri, 09 Apr 2004 22:56:00 GMT

Lately, I have been surrounded by NUnit in my daily conversations.

1. It is probably that I am a tester, I somehow got to write/improve some unit tests;
2. NUnit has quickly become a general practice (standard) among my product team where more developers, PM and testers have been pushing this neat practice;
3. NUnit has grown out of its design role among my test organization (I will explain later in this post)

First of all, you can find NUnit here. Let me introduce NUnit to people who have not used yet.

A simple test can be created with following few lines of code:

[TestFixture]
public class SampleTest
{
   [Test]
   public void MyTest()
   {
      Assertion.Assert(“This is MyTest“, 1=2);
   }
}

If you need more information about NUnit, please check out their documentation.

In addition to the NUnit which developers and testers can use for Windows-based applicaiton, NUnit has a version for ASP.NET (hear from my co-workers, I believe that it is still in beta) as well.

What have made NUnit a such interesting tool is that testers can leverage NUnit to do some cool testing practices.
- NUnit attributes can be extended by writing custom attributes by developers and testers;
- With a great number of unit tests, anyone can write a not-so-difficult .NET application with Reflection to discover NUnit unit tests by their attributes and invoke them one by one.

The advantages of using NUnit in normal testing scenarios are:
- Without too much code, testers can acquire coverage number on applications with an instrumentation tool;
- A suite of NUnit unit tests can set the minimum requirement for a code's minimum functional screening; therefore, this ensures that tester will not spend time on a broken build;

I think I will stop here for the day. As of myself, I am still exploring NUnit, I have been using it for a while now; however, with much more possiblity NUnit presents with other great tools, a tester nowadays can achieve many things without too much effort.

Performance test & a little bit of something else

larsun — Fri, 26 Mar 2004 00:25:00 GMT

Lately, I have been doing a great deal of performance testing. In fact, I am kinda glad that I had the opportunity and time to get good at it. I have only been working at MS for one and half years, a lot of the tasks we do daily here are still kinda new and exciting to me. For example, performance testing is not as easy as some people may think it is. There are so many factors which can affect the testing itself as well as the result. Most importantly, the purpose of a performance test is to measure the scalibility and architecture of an application. Sometimes, I even surprised at the conclusion we came to. All I have to say, “Performance testing is a science!”

What made the performance testing a science in my own mind is that the tester has to understand what he/she is going after, what kind of steps he/she needs to take to get there, and most importantly, how to interpret so many numbers a tester gets back from running the test. Here is a simple list of things a normal performance testing would need:

- Client(s) as computers which would run the test
- Target as the object a tester want to measure
- Performance Counters as the things someone need to pay attention to
- Duration as the length of the test which can vary dramatically from few minutes to several days; in some extreme case, even few months
- Warmup and CoolDown Time as the time the Target would get ready to be stressed and “Attacked”
- Numbers as the result a tester would get back from running a performance test
- Conslusion as the analysis of those numbers

If you haven't noticed yet, I was trying to create a cool acronym with the first letters of each term. Have a nice day, all! Hopefully you would find this post interesting.

P.S. My friend and I have been going to Applebee's lately for its Happy Hour menu, all I have to say is “Man, it is good!”

Larry's WebLog : Technology

NUnit vs. Your Own Unit Tests

Performance test & a little bit of something else