This provides an initial implementation of the logical game entities of STV Rogue. Some methods are left unimplemented for you. You can extend the project, but please stick to the imposed architecture and keep the signatures of the current methods.
Load the solution file (.sln) in Visual Studio. The solution contains the following projects:
- STVRogue: contains an initial implementation of the game entities.
- STVRogue_Main: a dummy console application for running the game.
- MSunitTests: an example a test project that uses Miscrosoft's own Visual Studio testing framework.
- NunitTests: an example a test project that uses NUnit testing framework.
- XunitTests: an example a test project that uses XUnit testing framework.
When extending the game logic, stick to pure C#. Avoid adding XNA classes to it, for example, since XNA does not interact well with the above unit testing frameworks (you will then need to write your own tetsing framework).
You will need the Enterprise edition of Visual Studio to be able to measure the coverage of your tests. The Enterprise edition also allows you to obtain code metrics from your solition (the size of every class, its complexity, etc).
There are three popular unit testing framework: Miscrosoft's own Visual Studio testing framework, the NUnit framework, and the XUnit framework. They all support the same basic functionalities, but there are small differences in their usage. I have included an example test project for each in the above solution.
If you want to try NUnit or XUnit, visit their website for instructions on how to install them in your solution. Install their respective VS runner too; this will allow you to run them from VS (rather than from Console). NUnit has beter documentation, but XUnit claims to be more modern :)
Among professionals, Automated Testing usually mean automating the execution of your tests. Here I mean something stronger, namely automatically generating your test inputs, or even test sequences. Unfortunately, test oracles cannot be generated by a machine, since machines cannot read our mind, so they have no clue what the intended definition of correctness of a given program is.
Automated generation of test inputs is however possible. As oracles, it makes sense to use so-called properties, which are predicates.
You can always build your own automated testing infrastructure, custom made for the program at hand. There is also this framework called [FSCheck] (https://fscheck.github.io/FsCheck/index.html) which can do that for you. It is a variant of QuickCheck for .NET. I have included several examples of testing using FSCheck which you can find in the project NunitTests.
Do keep in mind that all QuickCheck-like testing tools heavily rely on random generators to generate the test inputs. As such, you can't expect it perform well for generating inputs with very specific formats, e.g. valid email addresses. However, the framework allows you to write custom generators to get around this problem.
We won't have any lecture on how to use tool-X; it is part of your optional fun to study its documentation and discover it on your own how to use it. I won't spoil the fun :) Besides, the lectures are to be used to focus more on the underlying concepts.
Mutation test is NOT a test against your System Under Test. Instead, it is a test to measure the strength of your test suite, so it is also quite useful. In fact, it should actually be a standard tool to support unit testing. There are a number of mutation testing tool for C#, unfortunately none seem to work anymore, except perhaps one.
It's fun to do, and would be a useful experience too, if you manage to get the tool sufficiently working for you. For now, we will just do this for experiment, and simply hope that the maturity of the tooling would become beter in the future.
One tool that works is [VisualMutator] (https://visualmutator.github.io/web/). Do not install the standard distribution, install from this fork instead: https://github.com/pavzaj/visualmutator/releases
The fork works with VS 2013 and VS 2015. I haven't checked 2017. However, it only works in combination with NUnit tests.
The manual should tell you how to start and configure a mutation test. There is one annoying quirk of VisualMutator: after the mutation test, it retains the lock to classes under test (the classes you let it mutate), so you can't save changes into those files. Since the idea is to test your test suites, in principle you don't want to change the classes under test. The lock is realeased if you quite VS. It could be that this is a phenomenon that only happens on my Windows-7 machine :|