Herding Code 135: Remco Mulder and Jeff Schumacher on Continuous Testing

Episode 135

In this episode, the guys talk with Remco Mulder (author of NCrunch) and Jeff Schumacher (author of Giles) about continuous testing in .NET.

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Show Notes:

• Scott K kicks things off with a horrible old school BASIC joke.
• Remco explains how NCrunch got started because he was living under a rock.
• Jeff explains how Giles got started by finding AutoTest and seeing it not maintained (in reality it was).
• Remco talks about the number of test frameworks.
• Jon asks Remco about adding MSTest support - Remco groans about how difficult MSTest was to integrate with NCrunch.
• Jeff mentions that xUnit's test runner is complete for backward compatibility.
• Jeff talks about Machine Specs and avoiding versioning hell with Impromptu Interface.
• Jon asks about each library's approach to Continuous Testing and to explain it to a laymen.
• Rem explains what Continuous Testing is in relation to NCrunch.
• Scott comments on a "strange situation" of testing compiled code creates slow tests and asks about any shortcuts Rem or Jeff have taken.
• Jon comments how NCruch & Giles gives immediate feedback as he's coding.
• Jeff mentions that Giles has the ability to filter tests so that you only see what you want to see.
• Remco explains how NCrunch attempts to determine impact to order how tests are run so the most pertinent tests run first.
• Jon gives his quick history of the testing feedback cycle: separate project phase, then repository check-in step with continuous integration, local test runers, and now tests running as we write the code. Are we done? Where can we go from here?
• Jeff comments about how Continuous Testing is like the red squiggly for code problems.
• Scott asks about alternative language support for NCrunch and Giles.
• Remco mentions that Salesforce.com has a Selenium "cluster" to continuously run UI tests.
• Remco talks about Visual Studio integration for NCrunch.
• Jeff talks about a branch that supports Mono.
• Jon talks about Roslyn, and Scott K reminds us that Mono was doing compiler as a service long ago - 2008?
• Remco jokes about clippy.
• Jeff talks about Continuous testing and Pair Programming.
• Jeff wanted to get to the point where he didn't think about the tooling but only the tests and the code.
• Jeff talks about Visual Studio magazine and an article about Continuous Testing.
• Jon comments how easy NCrunch is able to setup and get going.
• Remco wants to make Continuous testing really really easy to get people to start using it.
• Jeff recommends looking at all the different continuous testing options, mentioning Greg Young's Mighty Moose.

Show Links:

• Jeff Schumacher - blog, twitter
• Remco Mulder - blog, twitter
• NCrunch
• Giles
• Mighty Moose from Greg Young
• Continuous Testing: Think Different [Visual Studio Magazine online]
• Project Roslyn

Show notes by Ben Dornis. Thanks!