AutoTest.NET4CTDD – AutoTest.NET forked tool for empirical evaluation of Continuous Test-Driven Development (CTDD) or Test-Driven Development (TDD) agile software development practice

AutoTest.NET was originally a .NET implementation of Ruby Autotest framework. It was first started by James Avary and hosted on Google Code and then maintained by Svein Arne Ackenhausen on GitHub. It is packaged as Mighty Moose Visual Studio plug-in and provided alongside with tutorial videos and documentation at http://www.continuoustests.com.

AutoTest.NET supports the test-driven development by intelligently compiling the code and running the tests in the background. By intelligently we mean the ability of AutoTest.NET to detect what tests were affected by lastly saved files and running only the tests that were affected in the background.

AutoTest.NET supports NUnit, the unit testing framework we have chosen, as well as other testing frameworks like XUnit, MSTest, MSpec, MbUnit.

To prepare for the empirical evaluation of the CTDD practice in industrial environment where Microsoft technologies are required, we have chosen AutoTest.NET open source plug-in and forked it on GitHub adding functionality required to gather measurement data.

You may download the tool from our GitHub repo 1 and 2. It is developed by Marcin Kawalerowicz.

The tool and the related CTDD practice is described in the paper “Continuous Test-Driven Development: A Novel Agile Software Development Practice and Supporting Tool” presented at the ENASE conference in 2013 (see my publications).