NUnit Vision

Stated simply…

The NUnit 3.0 Extended Testing Platform will be a world-class platform for individuals and teams using a test-centric approach to .NET software development.

On this page, we articulate the details of what that statement means to us. We don't specify features here - see the Nunit Roadmap for that - but try to provide set of guidelines that will help us when we are considering what features to add.

NUnit began as a relatively simple framework with a console-based runner. A Gui runner was added for version 2.0 along with a long list of features, but it remained essentially a test framework with a few runners. With NUnit 3.0, we aim to expand the role of NUnit so that it provides a platform for test-centric development.

Such an approach puts increased demands on NUnit as a tool. It must support a number of different kinds of tests, allow for alternative approaches to testing and be usable by team members in a variety of roles.

NUnit began as a unit testing framework. In later versions, we decided to support use of NUnit for integration and acceptance testing, but only to the extent that this support didn't interfere with our primary goal. With NUnit 3.0, we will fully support integration, acceptance, performance and other types of tests in addition to unit tests.

All of us are pretty excited about Test-Driven Development. However, we recognize that many programmers are either not yet using TDD or are working on legacy projects for which TDD is not even possible. NUnit 3.0 will support various alternative approaches, including generation of tests for existing code bases.

NUnit has always been viewed primarily as a tool for programmers. With the 3.0 version, we want to recognize and fulfill the needs of programmers, testers, interaction designers, web designers, data base specialists, customers, managers and any other members of the whole team.

All of this is a pretty tall order. We expect to satisfy many of these needs directly, but it would be impossible to satisfy - or even predict - all of them. By treating NUnit as a platform, we will make it possible for individuals, teams or third parties to add support for activities and approaches that are not provided out of the box.

Taking the above into account along with the requests we've received from users and our own interests, here are some directions we expect the next few releases of NUnit to take

We'll continue to expand the available choices regarding where tests are run. We now support use of multiple AppDomains as well as separate processes. We expect to expand this to cover test execution under a particular subsystem or on a separate machine.

NUnit will be extensible. We can't do everything for everybody but we will make it reasonably easy to add plugins to NUnit. The use of plugins is our main strategy for dealing with feature requests falling outside the basic unit-testing orientation of NUnit. In many cases, users will be able to implement a plugin that provides a special feature outside of our scope.

We'll continue to focus on .NET development. Testing non-.NET apps through tests written in a .NET language is an acceptable use of NUnit, but we won't give high priority to features that are needed only for that purpose.

We'll remain language neutral. We'd like to work with any supported .NET languages. We currently support C#, VB.NET, C++, J# and F#. We expect to add Iron Python and Iron Ruby and will support other languages where people ask for it, particularly if they are able to pitch in and help.

We'll remain platform-neutral and will add more platforms. When we use the term .NET, we don't only refer to MS.NET, but also to other ECMA-compliant implementations of the CLI. We currently support MS.NET and Mono and expect to add other platforms in the future. NUnit already allows running tests under different runtime platforms by use of a command-line option or by selecting an option in the Gui. We'll expand this to support running tests under the compact framework as well as Silverlight. We'll maintain separate download packages to support the different platforms, as we now do for Windows and Mono.

We will continue to be IDE-neutral. We'll continue to ship releases that run outside any IDE in order to reach as many people as possible. IDE-specific features - such as those now present for Visual Studio - will remain user-selectable and off by default. Any major IDE integration package - such as plugins or addins - will be packaged separately.

We will become more usable by other programs. We'd like to make it easy for other software to run tests programatically using NUnit. To that end, we will provide standard interfaces that make it easy for people to write their own clients. We can't guarantee that those interfaces will never change, but we'll make an effort to keep them reasonably stable.

NUnit will be internationalized and we'll work with those who want to provide localized versions.

We will improve our ability to work with other open source tools for .NET. This includes mock object frameworks, windows and web forms testers, Visual Studio addins, etc. We'll work with others to provide integrated installs of NUnit in combination with other tools. Some tools - those we use in our own tests - will be packaged with NUnit in the future.