Good news was announced yesterday for those that are using SSDT and want to write unit tests, unit testing functionality is now available. The announcement was made on the SSDT team blog in post Available Today: SSDT—December 2012. Here are a few thoughts about this news. Firstly, there seems to be a general impression that database unit testing ...

Test-Driven Development (TDD) is a software development practise that has been around for a few years. Wikipedia describes it as: Test-driven development (TDD) is a software development process that relies on the repetition of a very short development cycle: first the developer writes a failing automated test case that defines a desired ...

The biggest advantage of unit testing is the ability to make changes quickly, and with confidence that we have not broken anything with our change. Whether we need to speed up a query real quick, or to fix a bug, automated testing saves us a lot of time, especially if test failure is exposed in user friendly way. This post continues the series on ...

Once we have a considerable amount of unit tests, their maintenance begins to take noticeable time. If we need to change a module covered by unit tests, it may take less time to make the change itself than to change the corresponding tests accordingly. This post continues the series on unit testing, the previous posts are How to Benefit from ...

Ideally unit test harness should run very fast. Because all unit testing involving a database is quite slowish, we need to apply some effort to ensure that our tests finish in acceptable time. This slowness might not be a concern when we try out a cool new technology against a tiny set of objects and tests, but it surely does become an issue ...

Unit tests provide a very accurate snapshot of what we were thinking about (and what we were missing) when we were writing them. In fact, they are working examples of how we think our code should be used. More to the point, unit tests must be up-to-date, otherwise they would not pass.Fro example, if the signature of a method changes, or we add ...

Well-written unit tests should succeed only when the module being tested meets the requirements completely.If the test fails, it can do much better than just indicate failure. If the test has managed to provide a clear and comprehensive report of what is wrong, that can save us a lot of time troubleshooting. We shall see a few examples ...

In this post we shall see how to incorporate a typical manual test in an automated test harness with minimal effort. Because our goal is to benefit from unit testing, and not to develop as many features as we can think of, we shall concentrate on the most common use cases. In fact, just one use case is so common that is happens more often all ...

My naming convention obsession Anyone that has ever worked with me will tell you that I am a stickler for naming conventions. I have a somewhat obsessive reputation for it; I can’t help it – I seem to have a deep seated uncontrollable desire to ensure that every object in my database(s) is/are named consistently (is there anyone else out there ...

Ideal unit tests are easy to roll out, easy to maintain, run fast, and make a difference: without them making changes and troubleshooting are more difficult.Some common examples of unit tests do not grade well against this criteria. For instance, writing unit tests to verify that a database or a table exists is surely easy, and is a nice ...