NUnit Pocket Reference

Unit Testing with NUnit

This section discusses the different elements of the NUnit framework and how to use them to create unit tests and test structures. Figure 1-2 shows the relationship between the NUnit elements.

In the simplest case, NUnit requires only test cases and one or more test fixtures. Each test must contain at least one assertion. A description of these elements follows.

Figure 1-2. NUnit test elements

Unit Testing with NUnit

Test cases

A test is the lowest building block of unit testing and tests a single piece of software functionality. Programmatically, a test corresponds to a method in the unit test code.

You identify a test by decorating a method with the [Test] attribute. For example:

[Test]
public void Test1()
{
    // test case implementation
}

A test method must be public (so that the test runner can locate it using reflection), returns void, and take no arguments.

A unit test performs one or more assertions that determine whether the functionality being tested works properly. An assertion simply tests an actual post-condition against the expected post-condition required for the test to pass. Assertions are described later in "Assertions."

The [Test] attribute has an optional argument named Description that defines the description that appears in the test properties dialog in the test runner GUI. For example:

[Test (Description = "MyTest")]

Warning

For backward compatibility ...