You read it here first (well, you didn’t really—it’s Visual Studio Magazine that’s making the rather grandiose assertion in this article).
A message was posted to the XP mailing list earlier today that thanked the article for not calling it Test-Driven Development (due to the last fiasco where Microsoft seemed to have bungled their intepretation of test driven development with regard to their integrated testing tools).
However, in the first paragraph of the article is the following nugget:
“To be fair, it isn’t just the Visual Studio IDE that lacked integrated unit testing. None of the major development environments—and this includes Java IDEs—have integrated unit testing directly into the development IDEs. The Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) edition of Visual Studio 2005 corrects this …”
Now, admittedly my exposure to other IDEs is pretty limited (I’m primarily a .NET developer) but both Eclipse and IDEA when I used them had JUnit integrated nicely. Victor Goldberg followed up later mentioning a Smalltalk IDE that had a TDD framework built-in. So there are definitely other IDEs that have unit testing integrated.
Now, it’s true that this is the first time unit testing has been directly integrated into Visual Studio by Microsoft, but there have been add-ins for doing the same thing for some time (TestDriven.NET is the shining example). So part of the assertion is true. But, it’s just plain wrong to state that “[none] of the major development environments—and this includes Java IDEs—have integrated unit testing”.
Of course it’s possible my interpretation is a little different to what was intended, but I’m not sure it is. A more realistic explanation is that the language is a little looser than it should be and that Visual Studio is the first to provide an integrated, out of the box unit testing framework, which, is still something I’m a little unsure is true—my recollection is both IDEA and Eclipse had it out of the box, but maybe that’s just my memory?
Either way, it’s this definition of integration that bothers me. Why is it so much better that it’s provided by Microsoft straight away? It doesn’t take much to install the add-ins for the various IDEs, and more importantly, they appear to be far better (at least in Visual Studio’s case anyway). Visual Studio’s integrated unit testing appears to be entirely inadequate for those wanting to work test first with Test Driven Development, so I think I’ll stick with the free tools that work better thanks!