woensdag 11 juli 2012

NCrunch: completing the TDD experience


This Saturday, while attending the legacy code retreat of agileminds,  a colleague told me about a tool he’s using called NCrunch.  While I’m a very skeptical person regarding productivity tools, seeing that there is no valid competition for Resharper,  NCrunch rather seems to complete the experience rather than copy it.  The tool is free at the moment but that might change when the beta is over.

Basically what it does is build and run your tests in a separate process.  This alone made me want to back away from it because: how stressful will this be for my processor? Actually I barely notice any performance loss on my PC while developing.  My development laptop is an i5 quadcore with 8 GB ram, rather good but not a power beast.  The very first time you launch NCrunch you get the option to choose how many processor cores you want to use.  I used the typical 2 core setup with the engine mode option set to ‘run all tests automatically’.

It seems ridicules when I say that this tool boosted my performance allot.  Just by running the tests in the background?  Yes! You get a constant feedback of what code is covered, if your tests are green, a build that is not working, ...  Sure you can do this with Resharper and Dotcover.  But with NCrunch the feedback is in real time.  No need to build and no need to use alt + r + u + n (shortcut in resharper for running tests).  Actually since I’ve been using NCrunch, I’ve barely build and run my tests manually.  This saves me a bunch of time.

Instead of boring you with more fan ramblings, try it out yourself!  It’s free at the moment so no harm in trying.  Until next post!

2 opmerkingen:

  1. Sound like a cool tool, so it keeps on running your tests on the fly on the background? Going to install this tool once I get my new laptop for development purposes !

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  2. Jups, really speeds things up once you get used to it. Definitely a must buy when this gets out of beta.

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