Group by test class name in VS2012 Test Explorer

Background

Writing unit test case is always a good practice in programming. It gives confidence to re-factor code and make sure each and every piece is working properly. If individual pieces are working good mostly the application will work after integration.

Basics of Visual studio unit test framework

Visual Studio has out of the box unit testing framework. We can create test classes and those classes can contain test methods. Normally if we follow proper naming convention to relate production code with test projects, it is easy to see how the tests are performing. One of the naming convention for unit test class and methods names can be as follows

• Let the test project name be same as production project but suffix the test project with .Tests
• For each production code method, create a unit test class.
• Each scenario in the production method can be one test method in test class.
• Test class name can be <Scenario>_<Production Method Name>{}
• Method name can be <Test case specification>_<Expected behavior>()

eg: Production code

---

    public static class ObjectFactory
    {
        public static object CreateObject(string fullyQualifiedClassAndAssemblyName, object[] constructorParameters)
        {

//Production code which uses reflection to create object.

        }

    }

---

Unit test class

---

[TestClass, ExcludeFromCodeCoverage]
public class ObjectFactory_CreateObject
{
        [TestMethod, Timeout(1000)]
        public void WhenFullyQualifiedClassAndAssemblyNamePassedAndClassIsInternal_ShouldSucceed()
        {
//Test code

        }

        [TestMethod,ExpectedException(typeof(FileNotFoundException))]
        public void WhenFullyQualifiedClassAndNonExistingAssemblyNamePassed_ThrowFileNotFoundException()
        {
//Test code
        }
}

---

The main benefit of this naming convention is, it does not need any additional documentation to describe the what the test does. When we avoid one more item from maintenance, we are increasing productivity.

Running test cases from visual studio

We can easily trigger the unit test execution and see the results in "Test Results" window in VS 2010. The results will be shown with test name by default. The same functionality is there in VS2012 as well, but the window name is changed from "Test Results" to "Test explorer".

Problem

When the project grows, there are high chance that programmers forget to write test cases. Or even if there is strict enforcement, they will tend to write one test method like below for each and every production method.

---

[TestClass]
public class EmailSender_Send
{

        [TestMethod]
        public void WithProperparameter_ShouldSucceed()
        {

//Test code

        }

}

[TestClass]
public class Scheduler_CreateSchedule
{
        [TestMethod(), Timeout(30000)]
        public void WithProperParameters_ShouldSuccessed()
        {
//Test code

        }
}

---

Normally the test results will be displayed only with the test name and the test name is the test method name. That ends up in the test result window with all tests with same name. Its very difficult to understand from the review perspective.

If we want to see the test class name we can group by the test class name as below. This works well in VS2010.

[Photo taken from http://www.ladislavmrnka.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/TestView.png]

The same functionality in VS2012 named Test Explorer doesn't have Group by Class name in its earlier production releases. The group by popup is shown as below when try to group by class name.

This is really useless for somebody who want to see the test results. There is no idea why Microsoft removed a useful feature from earlier version in new release. But fortunately its back in later VS2012 updates. When this post is written, the latest update was Update 4.

Happy coding. Yes unit testing is part of coding:)