Teaching Approach

No fluff, no ranting, no beating the air. I esteem your time. The course material is succinct, yet comprehensive. All important concepts are covered. Particularly important topics are covered in-depth. For absolute beginners, I offer my help on Skype absolutely free, if requested.

Take this course, and you will be satisfied.

Build a solid foundation in Unit Testing with this course

This course is all about writing effective unit tests using C# programming language and NUnit as a unit testing framework. Along the way, we will learn the concepts related to unit testing. Today unit testing is an absolutely required skill from any professional developer. Companies expect from developers to know how to write unit tests including all the most important topics such as mocking and test driven development (TDD in short). This course does not cover all the features of NUnit. This course is way more interesting.

Learning unit testing puts a powerful and very useful tool at your fingertips. Being familiar with unit testing you can write reliable and maintainable applications. It is very hard to lead a project which is not covered by unit tests.

Content and Overview

This course is primarily aimed at beginner developers. It provides solid theoretical base reinforced by tons of practical material.

We start with basics of unit testing. What is a unit test? What unit testing frameworks exist? How to run and debug unit tests. After getting acquainted with the basics, we will get to the NUnit framework. Here you’ll learn how to install the framework, set the runner. Then you’ll learn the basics of assertions and arrange-act-assert triplet. Other key features of NUnit are also covered:

• Running tests from the console
• Setup and teardown unit tests
• Parameterized tests
• Grouping and ignoring

Practicing writing of unit tests, it’s impossible to avoid applying mocks. I like the word “test double” more, in general. By the way, you’ll learn what the difference between the following notion is:

• Test double
• Fake
• Dummy
• Stub
• Mock

You’ll learn how to write test doubles manually. You will also see a simple example of how to use a mocking framework for using mocks. I’ll use NSubstitute mocking framework for demonstration.

At the end of this section, you’ll get acquainted with two key approaches to unit testing, Classic or Detroit School and London School of unit testing.

You’ll separately learn the basic of test-driven development. It is hard to imagine a modern professional developer who doesn’t know about TDD, so you’ll learn what it is and what it is about. You’ll see the Red-Green-Refactor triplet in action.

I could not complete the course avoiding the best practices of writing unit tests. You’ll learn the basic concepts of the modern approach to unit testing called “pragmatic unit testing”. You’ll see what problems static classes and singletons bring regarding the unit testing. They make code harder to unit test. After that, you’ll learn the problem of extracting interfaces just for the sake of introducing shims for injecting dependencies.

You’ll know should you write unit tests for the trivial code. You’ll learn a lot more in the course.

So, in short, the course covers the following topics:

• Basic notions of Unit Testing
• NUnit and its basic features
• Test Doubles including fakes, dummies, stubs, spies and mocks
• How to write manual test doubles and how to use a mocking framework
• TDD, red-green-refactor triplet
• A great number of best practices of writing unit tests

In the end, we will recap what you have learned, and you will try to understand where you have to go further with the intention to master your skills.

Today unit testing is the absolutely required skill which is required from any professional developer. Companies expect from developers to know how to write unit tests including all the most important topics such as mocking and test driven development (TDD in short).

This course is all about practicing TDD using C# programming language and NUnit as a unit testing framework. Along the way, we will learn the concepts related to unit testing. This course does not cover all the features of NUnit. This course is way more interesting.

Learning unit testing and TDD puts a powerful and very useful tool at your fingertips. Being familiar with unit testing and TDD you can write reliable and maintainable applications. It is very hard to lead a project which is not covered by unit tests.

Content and Overview  

This course is primarily aimed at developers who’re already familiar with the basics of unit testing and dependency injection. Some experience in C# programming is required. The course provides solid theoretical base reinforced by tons of practical material.

We start with basics of test-driven development. Why we need TDD? What is TDD? When TDD fails, three laws of TDD, different types of tests, tooling and other fundamental topics. This section is mostly theoretical.  

Theory is dead without practice, so starting from the second section, you’ll see tons of programming sessions where I’ll demonstrate how to implement generating of Fibonacci numbers, FizzBuzz, parsing of roman numerals, updateable spin synchronization primitives, tic-tac-toe or crosses and noughts game and game in sticks. You’ll also learn:  

• How a regular agile development process looks like  
• That you need to learn shortcuts to practice TDD more smoothly  
• Three Main TDD techniques: faking, triangulation and obvious implementation  
• Which tests to write first  
• How to start writing a test in a TDD manner  
• Stack kata  
• Immutable stack kata  
• And list kata  
• What is acceptance testing  
• About the SpecFlow acceptance testing framework  
• How to write acceptance tests with SpecFlow in Gherkin language  
• What are UI tests  
• What tools for writing UI Tests exist  
• How to access UI through the TestStack.White framework  

Have you heard about katas? No, I’m talking about programming. In the third section, you’ll learn what is a code kata and I’ll demonstrate three code katas:  

Growing an application by writing tests first, we’re not only writing unit tests first. So, in the next section, you’ll learn what is acceptance testing and integration testing. You’ll learn:  

You’ll need to see how to apply all the material learned by this moment. Practice helps very much with understanding especially when we uncover highly practical topics such as TDD. That’s why I decided to show you how all the things work in practice altogether. So, in the next section, you’ll see a real enterprise approach for working on a software project in action.  

• I’ll build a bridge to UI through TestStack.White applying the Page Object design pattern  
• I’ll write acceptance tests using the bridge built for accessing UI  
• I’ll implement ViewModels and all the corresponding business-logic  
• What is TDD in the end? Is it possible to live without it?  
• The relationships between TDD and Agile development process  
• Should we design architecture upfront or not?  
• Do unit tests guarantee the success?  
• Quality of tests, some criterions  
• How to express data for writing unit tests  
• Shouldly for writing more readable assertions  
• Singletons, Static classes and testability, Builder design pattern  
• And some other important topics

The last two sections are rather philosophical. We will discuss:  

• What is TDD in the end? Is it possible to live without it?  
• The relationships between TDD and Agile development process  
• Should we design architecture upfront or not?  
• Do unit tests guarantee the success?  
• Quality of tests, some criterions  
• How to express data for writing unit tests  
• Shouldly for writing more readable assertions  
• Singletons, Static classes and testability, Builder design pattern  
• and some other important topics

Here is my Teaching Approach -

No fluff, no ranting, no beating the air. I esteem your time. The course material is succinct, yet comprehensive. All important concepts are covered. Particularly important topics are covered in-depth. For absolute beginners, I offer my help on Skype absolutely free, if requested.

Take this course, and you will be satisfied.

This course is all about growing object-oriented software guided by tests.

SpecFlow is a framework which brings Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) into life. It is all about filling the gap between technical people and domain experts. SpecFlow is based of a Gherkin language which is very close to natural (though, it is formalized). So, non-technical people can write executable documentation on their own.

Selenium is a framework which allows to drive browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Opera etc.). In other words, with the power of Selenium, you can write a program which automatically interacts with elements on a web page.

TestStack.White (sometimes, written as "teststack white") is a framework which allows to drive WinForms and WPF applications.

This course covers:

• Theoretical background behind different types of testing (unit, integration, and acceptance testing)
• SpecFlow: generating steps, run and debug tests, passing parameters, scenario outline, data table, converting parameters, converting data table, custom conversions, sharing data, categorizing tests, scoped execution, hooks and other features
• Selenium WebDriver: Locators, XPath Locators, CSS Locators, Interacting with all the types of Elements, Timeouts: Explicit and Implicit, Locators Priority, Picking Scenarios to Test, "Page Object" design pattern, Page Object Factory, uploading files
• Scraping a Live Web Site with Selenium WebDriver
• Selenium Extras: managing a web browser
• TestStack.White and Building a WPF App by TDD (with MVVM)
• Appendixes: intro to Unit Testing and Test-Driven Development