Selecting a Unit Testing Framework

Unit Testing Incentives

Due to the agile approach and feature-branch-styled GitHub Conventions chosen for the Wedium project, the team wants to ensure features can be automatically tested, so they do not break existing code. Unit testing is therefore required to ensure continuous integration occurs successfully.

To unit test the API backend, a .NET testing framework is required. There are a number of options available to create the required unit tests.

Unit Testing Options

• MSTest (easy to set up, slow, difficult to use with non-VS IDEs)
• NUnit (easy to set up, slow, well documented, similar to JUnit which we all know)
• XUnit (fast, new, intuitive terminology, poorly documented)

NUnit

NUnit was chosen as the unit testing framework for Wedium's API primarily due to its syntax similarity to JUnit; a framework for Java which all group members are familiar with. The similarity includes the usage of properties, set up methods and file structure. Choosing this allows the group to be much more productive with their time as less research is required.

Furthermore, it is easy to set up and very well documented online. NUnit offers very few, and much more manageable, drawbacks in comparison with the other options.