Test Driven Development, TDD, will become quicker and better with Visual Studio Team System 2010

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We have just recently started to talk about our next developer tool, Visual Studio Team System 2010, and I must say that I’m in love with one new feature already. Ok, I haven’t really tried it yet for myself, but just to read about this feature makes my Test Driven heart pump a little bit faster.

Identification of Impacted Tests – Visual Studio Team System 2010 will have a Test Impact View, that identifies all the tests that should be run to validate a code change. That is great, cause TDD is all about:

  • Red – Make sure you have a test that fails, by running all tests. If no tests fail, then write a new one that does fail!
  • Green – Fix the failing test by least effort.
  • Refactor – Make the code better, without changing any behavior of the code.

Now this has worked well before, but the first bullet point might take some time when you have a couple of thousand tests. Well you might think that the application should be better partitioned so that you don’t end up with that many tests, but the reality is that you might get there anyway (and some tests might even be integration tests that tests complicated interactions between several components and sometime you want to run those too). Anyway, I’ve been there, where the tests take too long time to run, that you start to cheat. You try to guess what tests that are impacted of a specific code change and only run those. Perhaps you run all tests before you check-in your code, but perhaps you cheat even there (even though you know you shouldn’t… shame on you if you commit this sin… shame on me if I have sinned).

This new feature in Visual Studio Team System 2010 will help you to figure out what tests are actually impacted by the code change you are about to introduce and will therefore speed up testing and development. Especially when using TDD.

Read more about this feature and other new features in Visual Studio Team System 2010 here:

https://msdn.microsoft.com/sv-se/vsts2008/products/bb725993(en-us).aspx