Automocking and BDD style tests with NUnit

I’m currently using context/specification style tests. While I think frameworks like J.P.Boodhoo’s are beautiful, I prefer something that works with ReSharper, TD.NET and CI without extra hurdles. I also want something my team, with limited exposure to *Unit frameworks, can easily pick up.

I’d prefer not to have the ceremony and misleading terminology of “Test” attributes, but its a trade-off I’m willing to make to more easily to integrate with team members and third party tools.

I put my testing stack along with an example test/spec project on github under the project name Specish .
About my tests/specs:

1 [image:3957684B-8C76-48EE-B578-702C8D248913-36973-0000019AF7B13069/resharper_navigation_thumb.png]

I preface every test fixture with the name of the class I’m testing. This lets me type “PC” in the navigation window of ReSharper to get to a PatientController or any class that tests patient controller.
Automocks allow me to change constructor signatures with no consequence, and let me only mock objects and methods necessary for setup or verification. I stole the base class for my tests from here .
I usually only have one assert per test method.
I use a modified version of SpecExtensions I saw Steve Harman use at Cleveland Day of .NET last year… so instead of Assert.IsTrue(true) I write the more readable true.ShouldBeTrue();
Custom ReSharper live templates for test fixtures and methods speed things up considerably.

The result looks something like this:

 1
 2
 3
 4
 5
 6
 7
 8
 9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
[TestFixture] 
public class PatientController_when_searching_for_patients_returns_one_result : base_automock_test 
{ 
    ViewResult result; 
    IList<Patient> patients = new List<Patient>(); 

    public override void establish_context() 
    { 
        patients.Add(new Patient{Id = 2}); 

        Mock<IPatientService>() 
            .Setup(ps => ps.Search(It.IsAny<string>(), It.IsAny<string>())) 
            .Returns(patients); 
    } 

    public override void because() 
    { 
        result = Create<PatientController>().List("Joey", "Smith"); 
    }   

    [Test] 
    public void it_returns_just_one_patient() 
    { 
        (result.ViewData.Model as Patient).ShouldEqual(patients[0]); 
    } 

    [Test] 
    public void it_returns_the_detail_view() 
    { 
        result.ViewName.ShouldEqual("Details"); 
    }  
}

And it shows up in the test runner as

PatientController when searching for patients returns one result
it returns just one patient
it returns the detail view

The test runner results document exactly how my controller behaves in this context.

PatientController returns just one patient and a detail view because I call List() on aPatientControlle in the context*(search the returns one result)*set in establish_context.

Automocking and BDD style tests with NUnit

See Also