Improved my development workflow

An article by Laurent Kempé No Comments

For some time now I slightly modified my development workflow and I have seen a great improvement in my developers life:

• it started by using Git Svn in front of our central Svn

• then I introduced NCrunch in my TDD/BDD

NCrunch is an automated parallel continuous testing tool for Visual Studio .NET. It intelligently takes responsibility for running automated tests so that you don't have to, and it gives you a huge amount of useful information about your tests (such as code coverage) inline in your IDE while you work.

 I am a fan of Test Driven Development and Behavior Driven Development, I think there are great tools in a developer toolset in quite some circumstances.

I am also a great fan of JetBrains ReSharper which I use every development day and I couldn’t work as efficiently without it. But…

So what’s the point? NCrunch propose only an automated parallel continuous run of your test. Big deal, it saves you only some keystrokes! Yeah I believed that too, but the difference was quite impacting.

I don’t need to think anymore about running the tests I just run through my TDD thinking only of my tests and code, no distraction just seeing the result of my changes directly aligned with my code.

What I really liked about NCrunch is:

• the possibility to run only a part of the tests
• the feedback given in the code window
• let me focus on the code
• the risk/progress bar
• the impact it had on my productivity

I really encourage you to try NCrunch which is free during the beta period.

Supported testing frameworks are:

• NUnit
• MS Test
• Xunit
• MbUnit
• MSpec

The Xunit and MbUnit test runners are provided with thanks to The Gallio Project.

Supported languages and .NET versions are:

• C#
• VB.NET
• F#
• .NET Framework v2.0 and above
• Visual Studio 2008
• Visual Studio 2010
• Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview