Best Practice: Organize Unit Tests [closed]

Question

I have solution with >270 projects, it contains various folders and etc. Imagine each project have Unit Tests, what do you think what is the best way to organize them? Should each project have Unit Tests near by, or I should create special folder for them, or even different solution for just unit tests.

How do you organize them for such a big solutions/projects ?

Answer 1

You should have one (or more) unit test projects per target project. This is the only way you can stay flexible and vary each unit test suite together with the target project.

If you have one unit test project covering more than one target project, this creates an artificial tight coupling between these two projects, because you will not be able to compile the unit test project without all of its target projects. This, again, makes it really hard to test a single project in isolation - which is what unit testing is all about.

If you need to share test code between several test targets, you can always create a shared library with a generalized, reusable test API, as long as it doesn't reference any of the target projects.

That said, I have to agree with Jon Skeet that a solution with 270 projects is a structural smell that must be addressed first (unless it is a "build all" solution used for automated builds).

Answer 2

A single solution with 270 projects sounds like a problem to start with. How long does it take to open VS? :) (Seriously, can you either combine some projects together or split the solution?)

Typically I keep the unit tests in their own project, but in the same solution. Within the project, mirror the folder/namespace structure of the production project. Have a look at how Noda Time is organised for an example. I've been at companies where they've been kept in a separate solution, but that was really painful. (They had a good-ish reason: the tests were in VS2005 and the production code was 2003.)

Sometimes I've set the default namespace of the test project to be the same as the production project - that's more important in Java than in .NET (as it lets you get at package access members) but it can still be helpful as it means the class you're going to test doesn't need to be imported.